My first drug was a tranquilizer. It was given to me at six, by my mother, because I suffered from insurmountable separation anxiety. Too panicky to go to school, this pill really worked. It took away all the misery: the rapid pulse and the gagging as she tried to pry me from her apron strings. I felt no high or dizzy rapture; I simply needed the pills to get to school, because somehow at six, I went off the rails. The how and why I developed a case of nuclear anxiety so young remains unclear. But at six I knew my best years were behind me. Of course this is a time of shifting chronology and uncertain memory. I wouldn’t be subsumed into the sea of drugs until later. By the time I was fourteen hard drugs found me and my addiction began in earnest. It came with a visit from a girl I barely knew. Kathy was, at sixteen, two years older than me. Those two years elevated her to an unreachably cool stratosphere, way out of the league of a girl my age. We were affluent kids from affluent islands--floating residential paradises in Miami. Because I was new to the island and wanted friends, I was thrilled at the thought of her showing up, and blind to the real reason for the visit: to rifle through my mother’s medicine chest for drugs. She sauntered in wearing cut-offs and flip-flops, lots of gold jewelry set against a perfect tan. After a few short words, she got to the point: “I want to look for sleeping pills in your mom’s bathroom.” At first I was bewildered as to why she’d want a sleeping pill so early in the evening, but I took her back to my mom’s bathroom where we found an enormous stash of Seconal in a bottle the size of a honey jar. And she went right to it. That this was both drug use and theft made no impact on me. I let Kathy pour half the bottle into her hand. Then she suggested I take one. And I did. What unfolded from there was a young adult life brought down and soaked in drugs and later drink. But I was young. Second chances were on my side and I pulled it together and stayed sober for years. But the disease was ticking in me and waiting to meet opiates. Opiates showed up right on time, if not early, and the disease met me again at the dawn of the crisis. A crisis that now sees 70 people die everyday.
Here’s what I’m certain of: The story of the anxious little girl begins as a happy kid in a happy town. A kid who had no idea that storm clouds were gathering and who showed no trace of who I’d become: a pill popping kindergartener. Taking dolls.
My conscious memories of happy times all begin and end just across the Hudson from Manhattan in Englewood New Jersey, an upper class, majestic town set in dense wood of winding streets. My father Sam moved the family here from a modest rental across the river because of an uptick in his fortunes. Sam Coslow triumphed in a couple of worlds: show business and finance. To be twice blessed seemed to set him apart from other men. He followed his early success in Hollywood, where he’d composed songs and won an Oscar, with a second equal if not better success on Wall Street.
He found us a large modern redwood set among the Norman Chateaux, Cotswold Manors, and Italian Palazzi—-homes set on so much land you’d barely noticed the collision of sensibilities. With a wing of glass and a wraparound deck that looked out onto the woods, he’d bought the house from an architect meant to design us one, not sell us one. We got the architect’s house and his dog: a sweet old Mastiff named Toby, which my mother refused to return to the man’s family once they got settled-- after we’d uprooted them in the first place. That something went wrong here is certain—something that started the drugs. I think at six I began to realize I wasn’t like everyone else. I was different, non-conforming, odd. I felt the expectations of the world on my shoulders. To be a good girl, a girly girl. I was different. I wasn’t that. I don’t know if I knew then what it was that made me different, but I would find out in time.
If it started with my parents, well they began in the sunlight too.
My mother Frances King had both a strength and a kindness. When Julia got breast cancer, and before I could even process it, “Oh that poor girl” my mother said as she began to cry. I didn’t even think they were that close. She sang her way out of Blackwell Oklahoma with an opera scholarship. With her partner Harry Noble, Frances was half of a cabaret act called Noble and King. They billed themselves as Royalty in Song. They played the great rooms and cabarets of the cafe society era. My mother wore beaded gowns; Harry sat at a Steinway in tails. I’m sure there was a candelabra
Frances was also the “other woman” in Harry’s life who’d waited too long in back street purgatory for Harry’s long promised divorce. The night she met my father, while singing at Number One Fifth Avenue, she was as determined to leave Harry and the act as she was to leave Blackwell. She was ready to be married and at 30 feared becoming an old maid.
As the story goes: Sam walked into Number One Fifth Avenue with a 6’3” showgirl named Mary Dowell, who--owing to a lifelong stammer--went by the stage name “Stuttering Sam.” (not to be confused with my father Sam.) Sam and Mary were more friends than dates, and it would be Mary’s roommate, my mother, who’d change the destiny of this darkly handsome, twice divorced songwriter After exiting the stage, my mother sat down to chat with her roommate and the songwriter who’d tagged along. While they chatted they discovered that my father had written “Was it a Dream?” My mother’s song--the theme song of the only twelve year old with a radio show in Blackwell Oklahoma. They’d bill the coincidence as fate, and maybe it was. Two months later they were married. Soon they added a kid to the act: me.
Which brings me to the move to New Jersey and the time I excessively mine for answers to a life of drugs. My parents were funny and sophisticated but also slightly hysterical. Sam’s hysteria took the form of vaulting hypochondria and numerous phobias: no flying, no self-service elevators (Sam’s best friend Jack used to say, “Why do you need an elevator man in there Sam? That’s one more person stuck in there with you when it breaks down.” But there’s was no talking out of irrational fears) and all theater seats on the last row of the aisle; Fran’s hysteria had a spin of frantic energy that could be mistaken for a good time. Some days my mother shared my father’s fears, other days they frustrated her. “Jesus Sam, here, Take a Miltown.” She’d say shoving the, now extinct, tranquilizer in his hand if he went in to paroxysms over getting in self-service elevator. They were different from other parents. People were in awe of them, they were the center of the world they lived in. Their parties brought Wall Street moguls, writers, composers, and actors together. Smokey cocktail drenched evenings. I’d wander around until bedtime. My parents always performed, my mother singing my father’s song while he played the piano. She sang with each phrase emotionally wrung from her voice. One hand resting on the Steinway, the other gesturing with a gilded lorgnette. The guests swelling with awe in their presence. But these performances would come to embarrass me in time. I’d take solace in the sidelines, not liking the spotlight that my parents tried to shine on me too. I hated the glow.
Sam also was twice as old as all the other kids’ dads. While he had limitless mental stamina (staying up all night working on issues of stock sheet) he had next to none physically. There was only one game he’d play with me as a child: “Sleeping Beauty.” Sam insisting on performing the role of The Sleeping Beauty himself, lying on the couch, eye’s shut, in his navy suit and horn-rimmed specs. I’d run over and, as the handsome prince, kiss him awake. He’d designed the game to allow me to play while he napped. It would be his daughter Jackie, my half-sister, from his second marriage who’d give me the time and energy I needed. At fifteen years my senior she was more of a mother than a sibling.
Then suddenly I had trouble going to school. Something I’d never had before. The kid who’d reveled in the school yard across the river, couldn’t leave her mother. My earliest memory of the separation anxiety that would begin the drug taking, was after my parents went to enroll me in a new school. The Elizabeth Morrow little school was founded by the educator/sister of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the aviator and mother of “The Baby.” The school was housed in a rambling estate, a short walk down a hill from our house. It felt like an airless faraway galaxy filling the most carefree kid in the universe with dread. My initial interview there was the first time I remember feeling any meaningful anxiety. I went into a small room with Sam, Fran, and Constance Chilton, the head mistress who’d founded the school with Elizabeth Morrow herself. I was given the task of recreating some basic shapes: a star, a diamond, a square and so on. Terror took hold and I could barely form a sentence. I was completely overwrought. I’d failed my little test. Miss Chilton, as she was called, a very, very tall and imposing Marie Dressler type, decided that I was too emotionally fragile to enter first grade and insisted I spend another year in K. A stunning defeat . . . for my mother.
We walked back up the hill in silence until suddenly my mother fumed to my father, “Are they kidding??? Not ready for first grade?” Sam didn’t deal with issues like this. She’d go on to mention how little they knew, how off base they’d been, and when running out of ways to make the school wrong, she blurted, “Those two broads are dyke time in Normandy.” Meaning Constance Chilton and the long dead Elizabeth Morrow. And somehow I-- too emotionally stunted for first grade--got the World War II musical reference with its Sapphic implications. At five I was fluent in elliptical show biz language. She grabbed my hand, quickened her pace, and stormed up that hill. My father, the smoker, huffed and puffed and lagged behind.
. I realize that separation anxiety does not put me on top of the scale of troubled kids and this story of the school test is only important for what it leaves out: why I didn’t want to go to school in the first place. I will probably keep dredging for events that may or may not have happened. But the memory stands out, and always will, as one of a few that will jigsaw neatly into an addict.
So good!! Aww, just want to jump in to story and protect, little Cara. 🥺
Your writing is so expressive! Wow!! Some parts in the story had me laughing even while feeling a sense of melancholy for the circumstances. You’re so good with words!!
If tis winds up being a novel, a great opening line would be: "At six years old, I knew my best years were behind me."