Category Archives: Drug addiction

bulimia, Drug addiction, emotional anorexia, love, sexual trauma

Josh’s House

A year after Josh and I broke up, he bought a house midway down Nectarine off Hollister in Goleta, right around the corner from 7-Eleven. It had a six-foot-tall, newly constructed wood fence around it and a giant weed-infested yard with the weight bench and weights we’d bought together years before, sitting rusted and unused.

Built in the ’50s, the house had one bathroom off the linoleum-floored kitchen, and a living room with two couches stretched lengthwise along the wall opposite two bedrooms. There was a giant fish tank filled with Oscars on the kitchen counter, a counter always loaded with a ton of dirty dishes. Every time I visited, I cleaned the kitchen.

Although only two people officially lived in the house, there was an endless stream of people there: traveling bands and crusty punks, local skaters, Josh’s friends, and a drug dealer or two.

It was 1997 and I’d moved to Los Angeles to start my first real job after college as an assistant marketing manager at a shopping center, but still drove up to Goleta most weekends.

I missed Josh a lot. We’d been best friends before we started dating. Not seeing him was difficult.

I was worried about him. He’d started using heroin. There was always dope at the house. I smoked tar a handful of times with him, even had him cook it up and drip it down the back of my nose, making me puke. Granted, I was puking all the time anyway. My bulimia was raging. I was going home on my lunch breaks so I could vomit after eating. It was a little tense with the former football player roommate because of this.

Or maybe it was tense at home because I’d slept with him. One night we’d ended up getting drunk, doing cocaine, and playing strip poker. I’d lost so egregiously that it was unanimously decided I had to give him a blow job and fuck him.

Something like that.

We’d been watching the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape while playing strip poker. I think he put that into the VCR as soon as we got back from TGI Friday’s, where he’d bought me a seared ahi tuna salad and several rounds of frozen bellini’s.

Unlike my living situation, Josh’s house was safe for my bulimia at least. At his house, finding vomit in the toilet was normal. Hell, people would puke outside sometimes. No one gave my bulimia a thought. They just figured I was using. I felt accepted, although nobody really gave a shit. Though Josh loved and accepted me no matter what I did, he turned a nodded-out eye.

After those years of being completely off limits as Josh’s girl, I was now available. And, because I had been his girl, I became the ultimate conquest. I was an easy target. I wasn’t hanging with the pack when everyone was shooting dope in one of the bedrooms. I was often alone in the living room watching television with our dog, Lucky. The guys would circle around –  whichever ones weren’t shooting up. The good news for them was that I would fuck whomever to manage the pain of watching Josh use. We’d fuck in close proximity to Josh – close enough for him to hear every single movement.

Maybe I was doing it as a cry for help to distract him. A part of me would have loved to believe that. But it’s not true. I did it to hurt him. It hurt me too, but that was beside the point.

One such incident occurred at a Fourth of July wedding in the hills above Santa Barbara. I was drinking outside in the sun, wearing a short strappy mini-dress. Josh and a bunch of our friends went inside to shoot up. I stayed outside, sitting next to a tub of beer, guzzling like a pro.

“Wanna go on a hike? You seem a little lonely and it’s a beautiful day. We can go for a hike a little further up the hill and watch the sunset.”

I don’t remember his name or if he even bothered to introduce himself.

“Sure. Let’s bring some beer.”

I grabbed a couple cans of Meister Brau Light from the ice-cold tub. I was on my sixth or seventh at this point, and believed that because it was light beer it wouldn’t get me drunk.

We walked along a hillside trail. It was a clear day and we could see all the way out to the Channel Islands. He found a spot for us to sit on a picnic table. I sat down and he started to kiss me. He pulled my dress up and slid his hand up the inside of my right thigh, under the edge of my panties.

For a minute it seemed like a good idea. It was physical affection and I was in pain. He pulled my panties off, stepped back and unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and pulled out his cock. As he slid his penis inside me, my emotions turned quickly. I started crying.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

I pulled my panties back up and patted my dress back down, grabbed my beer and started walking back to the party – but not inside. I was still afraid to go in there. I knew what they were doing.

Eventually we left and went back to Josh’s house, where I snuggled up on the couch, softly crying.

Another night, Josh and I went to the Mercury Lounge with some of the guys who lived up the street. It was a fun night. Some punk band was playing and the bar served Chimay Blue. I loved Chimay in all its iterations, but Blue was nine percent alcohol with a smooth caramel sweetness to it. I drank quite a few.

We got back to Josh’s house and one of the neighbor guys decided to spend the night in the living room with me. We hadn’t flirted or anything up to this point, but now he was staying there. He wasn’t really my type, but smelled like my favorite conditioner, Abba Moisture Scentsation.

I gave him a blow job. What I remember most about it was his complaint that it wasn’t good enough, pushing against the back of my head and critiquing the way my tongue caressed his cock. He complained loudly enough that I knew Josh could hear him. I moved to the other couch, passed out and woke up agitated and embarrassed a few hours later. I snuck out and drove back to L.A. before sunrise.

The situation in Josh’s house was out of control. On one hand, I kept visiting with this fantasy of being able to get Josh into rehab. I looked into it but it wasn’t affordable.  Even if I could have afforded it, I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting him to go. Sometimes I believed that I could bring the old beer-loving Josh back. I brought him cases of his favorite beer, kegs of others. When I visited, I’d make sure we made it out to the Mercury Lounge where we would see live music. I thought, maybe if I could get him back into music he’d stop using.

On the other hand, I visited for reasons that had nothing to do with saving Josh or even spending time with him. His house was a place where I could drink, get laid and sometimes do a little cocaine, though less and less frequently. My sexual encounters became increasingly questionable with each visit. I almost always fucked someone, but I wasn’t usually attracted to him.

One weekend I came up for the World Heavyweight Championship between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. It was a huge party. They’d bought stuff to barbecue, potato chips, soda, and some booze. There must have been 20 people in the house.

“White in this room, black in the other.” Kevin was giving a tour to me and the other new arrivals.

“Cocaine?”

“Um, no. Heroin, dear.”

I walked to 7-Eleven to get some crappy beer and a Slim Jim for Lucky. No one went to 7-Eleven without getting a treat for Lucky – especially me. He would show enormous disappointment in anyone who came back with a bag from 7-Eleven without a treat. It was the least I could do for the dog I’d raised as a puppy. Most visits, I got to the house early enough to take him for a walk on the beach. But not on this day. Lucky and I played in the yard for a while until the fight started. Everyone else worked on getting their high.

By the time I went in to get a seat, everyone had more or less begun crowding around the television. All that was left for me was a spot on the floor against the wall near the bathroom. Not even into the second round, I was the only one watching the match. Everyone else had nodded out. Now and again there’d be a little movement, and a few comments about the match.

At the start of the third round, I looked around the room and noticed that my friend Chris was turning purple I heard gasping and looked back at the screen in time to catch the image of Holyfield’s ear bleeding.

“Holy shit!”

I was grateful for the commotion, barely registering that Tyson had bitten a chunk out of Holyfield’s ear. I needed to help Chris.

“Hey guys, I think Chris is O.D.-ing.”

“Oh shit,” and one of them started slapping him on the face. He opened his eyes and took a breath. I remember going for a walk with Chris later on that night. He lived – at least that time.

I went back home the next morning and had this nightmare:

I’d been invited to a concert by a friend and wandered out into the night still in a towel from my shower. I heard a puppy whining and followed the noise until I found him, cut up and bleeding with a syringe sticking out of his neck. There was more crying and I found more dogs, half butchered, with syringes everywhere. I kept finding more and more injured dogs. I started calling out to all the dogs, gathering them around me and continuing to look for more.

They all followed me except one: Lucky. Lucky was rolling around and wouldn’t come with me. I could sense that whoever had been hurting the dogs was nearby and looking for us. I took off running, getting as many of the dogs to run with me as I could. Lucky stayed behind.

I felt so traumatized the next morning after this nightmare, I barely made it to work. My mind was filled with the images of butchered and hurting dogs, and I felt an enormous guilt over not being able rescue Lucky.

I never went back to Josh’s house after that horrible dream. I carried a lot of guilt for abandoning him, Lucky, and everyone else I knew.

Drug addiction, love

Four Deaths Don’t Make A Marriage

In the two years leading up to the night I met my husband, there had been four deaths in my family. My dad’s brother and two of my mom’s relatives drank themselves to death. Literally. As in the film Leaving Las Vegas. Fortunately, that film had come out the year before they started dying, and it gave me the frame of reference I needed to process their deaths – sort of. You never expect this sort of thing to happen, at least not when you’re still in your 20s. Sure, I’d seen a friend overdose on heroin, but that was different.

On some level or another, I knew my dad’s brother, Winston, was killing himself with scotch and cocaine when we’d visited him a few years before.

The death of my grandma’s brother, Dan, was much more of a surprise to me. He was on the good side of my family, the normal side, my mom’s side. They were Midwesterners who had traveled the world in the Air Force but maintained their small-town values. Dan was my mom’s favorite uncle and my smoking buddy on family visits. He and I were the only smokers in the clan. Besides, he spoke to me like an adult when most of the family still treated me as if I were 12. I was one of three great-grandchildren, the oldest one, but still one of the babies. Dan and I talked about love and sex while drinking and smoking at the edge of my great-grandma’s driveway in Phoenix. That’s my last memory of him and of that house. After he died, my great-grandma was moved into a home. Dan had been her caretaker after he had retired from his role as the VP of Marketing of some big hotel chain.

My great-grandma’s house wasn’t a fancy one in a nice suburban neighborhood, but it was filled with love. I remember the smell of my great-grandma’s tea-rose perfume, her bath cubes and oils, the pink and gold marbled wallpaper in the bathroom, several hand-crocheted afghans throughout the home, ’70s green and brown shag carpet in the living room, and family photos everywhere.  There was always the smell of food cooking in the kitchen: granola baking in the oven, Cincinnati chili, and popcorn cooked in bacon grease on the stovetop, sometimes even spoon bread.

I’d sit on the barstool watching her cook, eating chocolate turtles and Almond Roca. At one time my family was huge, more than 20 people, and we completely filled that house. I was the first great-grandchild, so that place meant love to me. It was the one place in the world where I was cherished and special and wanted.

As I got older, my great-grandma’s and grandma’s generations started dying and my mom’s cousins left town, scattering to Cincinnati, Atlanta, and a few smaller towns in the South. Our gatherings got a lot smaller and Dan was left alone to take care of his mom.

We knew he was unhappy, but we had no idea how much drinking he was doing until the day my grandpa went to take a sip from the wrong glass, Dan’s glass, of what he expected to be water. That was three months before Dan died. Before that, we didn’t know anyone in the family had a problem. Or at least we didn’t talk about it. I mean, everyone drank, but not to the excessive levels of my dad’s side of the family. And there were no drugs. Then, out of the blue, Dan was found dead in his living room. He’d died of complications from drinking.

Two weeks later, my mom’s younger cousin David was found dead in a hotel room from alcohol poisoning. He’d sequestered himself in the room after his wife kicked him out. I hadn’t known him well, but he had been seated with me at the kids’ table a few years in a row, along with his wife, Mimi, when I was a tween.

Then, one year later, my great-grandma died. My mother and I flew out to Missouri and made the drive together from Kansas City to Mound City. The funeral itself was in Fairfax, a town of 700 people and 10 churches, but no motel. My great-grandma was well-loved in Fairfax. She had been actively involved in the Fairfax Christian Church as a young girl and into adulthood, up until she and her fourth cousin got married and moved to Cincinnati, where they opened a funeral home. I never got to meet my great-grandfather, but everyone in the family spoke highly of him. He was missed.

In Cincinnati, both joined numerous congregations across several denominations, though the bulk of their business was with Catholics, including several members of the Mafia. It was the Great Depression and the Mafia had money. Too many of the payments they received at that time were gifts of desperation: jewelry, silver coins that had been melted down into a bowl and pitcher, and various services that community members could offer. My great-grandparents were good people. Everyone said my great-grandpa had been a remarkable man. He died when I was just a baby. For me the center of my family was my great-grandma. She was all love. She had held the family together across generations, money struggles, and death. She was a true matriarch.

Her funeral ceremony was one of those overly religious ceremonies with guarded words explaining her death as “a move on to another life in heaven,” skirting the very real loss I felt, we felt as a family. The lack of acknowledgment of our very real grief was stifling, as was the gathering afterward in the basement of the church with its fluorescent lighting, endless cakes, cookies, potato salad, Jell-O salad, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and soda. I couldn’t handle any of the food on this trip. It was everything I had ever binged on.

Most of my family members there were over 60 and unfamiliar to me. I felt walled-in with my emotions, without an outlet. I stood out as the only great-grandchild present and everyone wanted to talk to me, but all I wanted to do was run away and cry. And drink.

Things got even worse when we left the gathering and headed back to Mound City. Everywhere we went, I got stared down. I didn’t fit in. I thought it was my dyed-red hair and jeans, my age. The reality was probably that I was being checked out by the local guys, age-appropriate or otherwise, and sized up by the women.

Later that evening, my immediate family gathered in one of the hotel rooms to do a proper memorial the way my great-grandma would have wanted, the way we wanted to honor her –with Dixieland jazz and booze. My mom’s cousin, Scott, had brought a nice bottle of Captain Morgan’s. We each said a toast and drank a shot.

It felt as though my family was dwindling, dying off. There were fewer than 10 of us there: my mom, my grandparents, my grandma’s sister, Jackie, and her husband, and my mom’s cousin Scott. There were others who hadn’t been able to come, but still. We were tiny and it felt as if that was all that was left. I didn’t want my family to end. I felt the weight of that on my shoulders and the pressure to have a baby.

Marriage and children weren’t things I’d ever really thought about. I wasn’t entirely sure I ought to be bringing children into the world, either. I knew I was pretty screwed up emotionally and had never been comfortable bringing another person into my reality. I didn’t trust anyone, not enough to let anyone in – not all the way. Anytime I had, it had made things worse. I lost track of myself in romantic relationships. I’d let this other person tell me who I should be and what I should do until I would cut my losses and run.

I considered myself an utter failure in all of my attempts to build a great relationship. But I was 27 now and feeling that maybe all I needed to do was put my mind to figuring this love thing out. If I could be successful at work and school, I figured I could deal with dating, marriage and maybe even kids. I was in business school at the time, so I was meeting lots of people and feeling pretty confident about myself.

I started domesticating myself: cooking more, cleaning my house. I planted sunflowers and Mexican sage in the front yard. I stopped making out with random guys and stayed celibate for nine months. I went on dates. There were quite a few guys who asked me out, mainly fellow students, though most of the ones I hoped would ask never did because they were already married or otherwise attached.

At the start of my summer break in 2001, I took a batch of homemade absinthe to a party at a friend’s apartment in Sherman Oaks. I was wearing a red velvet tube top with tight, dark Levi’s. There were two guys flirting with me in the kitchen: one a successful but socially awkward C.G.I. animator and the other a handsome, charming, broke writer whose actress sister had brought him to the party. Being true to myself, I asked the writer if he’d ever tried absinthe.

“Yes.”

Dick had never tried absinthe before. Probably a good thing because mine wasn’t the best–tasting – but he didn’t say a word. I figured out his lie a few months later, well after we’d started calling each other daily and spending our weekends together.

The one thing I can say about Dick was that he was easy. I got him drunk on our third date together and made him watch Requiem for a Dream with me. And then we fucked on the carpet in front of my television. Then on my desk. Then on the bed. Then we got up in the morning and messed around on the couch and in the kitchen.

 My nine months of celibacy were over! 

In the early days of our relationship, we had fun. We had wild, passionate sex and drank a bit too much. But I was still living by myself, saving the reckless, raucous relationship for the weekends. When we were at his place in Hollywood, we were surrounded by his sister’s filmmaker friends. I met Rob Zombie and Sheri Moon at a wrap party for Toolbox Murders right after House of a Thousand Corpses came out. There were film premieres and awards parties, ongoing film and writing projects with her neighbors and the various people she met along the way.

Two years later, when his sister moved to Austin, Dick and I moved in together. All of his sister’s friends were out of the picture. We spent our weekends drinking and shopping. He didn’t always make it home by a reasonable hour at night, and sometimes came home drunk. But I was working out in the evenings and bringing work home. I was making good money at the time. We lived right off Third Street on Orlando in a giant 1920s apartment.

Things were looking good for my future and my plan to get married. It took a few months of arguing, but Dick finally agreed to get engaged. I started planning our wedding and designed my engagement ring. I asked my mom if I could use the diamond from her engagement ring from my dad. She’d taken to wearing it as a toe ring and said yes.

It was a beautiful ring. I had it made to match a pair of earrings Dick had bought me the first year we were dating. They were beautiful, white-gold flowers with aquamarines clustered around an amethyst. The ring wasn’t terribly expensive since we’d reused the diamond. I knew how much it cost. I paid for it.

A few weeks later, he went and picked up the ring and proposed to me in front of a sculpture of the Hindu goddess Shri Lakshmi at LACMA. I had hoped he would take me to the Getty with its spectacular views of the city to propose, but LACMA had been the spot of one of our first dates. After he proposed, we went straight to Molly Malone’s for drinks, and spent the rest of the day drinking.

The first giant red flag I ignored was straight from my subconscious mind. I was determined to get married on April 31. Really determined. It took a few conversations with locations and wedding planners before I understood that April 31, 2005, wasn’t a real date on the calendar. I accepted May 1 as the date. A Sunday.

Next, I wrote the ceremony myself, throwing in enough “God” for the Christians but not too many for the atheists in my family. Nothing from the Bible. I handpicked poems for our mothers to read. My mother read, “A Variation on Sleep” by Margaret Atwood, and Dick’s mother read Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” I wrote our vows. My family walked the aisle to Blondie’s rendition of “Follow Me” from Camelot. Dick and his groomsmen marched out to Johnny Cash singing “ ’Cause I Love You.” And then my bridesmaids and I made our entrance with PJ Harvey’s “One Line.” I cried as I made my way toward Dick, looking into his eyes the whole way there. It took me a minute to catch my breath before the ceremony could start.  I was thankful for the length of the song.

The only contribution that Dick made to the wedding was picking the closing song, PJ Harvey’s “We Float.” Ending with that song, of all songs, should have told me something. You carried all my hope until something broke inside. It should have given me pause. But the advances had been paid, the invitations sent.

In the final weeks before the wedding, I realized that Dick hadn’t done anything regarding the wedding bands. I found white gold replicas of 17th-century poesy rings online that read “cuisle mo chroide,” which means “pulse of my heart” in Gaelic. They didn’t arrive on time though, so I bought a couple of cheap silver bands for the ceremony.

Three weeks before the wedding, Dick realized his out-of-state Texas driver’s license was well past expired. The new one did not come in time to get a marriage license. Our marriage was not legal.

We ended up driving to Vegas a month later with my mother and a friend of hers as witnesses to make it legal. Dick and I were drunk and high on blow, but I looked fabulous in a white skimpy mini-dress and four-inch platform heels as I walked down the aisle.

In my defense, through all of these mishaps, as I walked face-first into these gigantic red flags, I was focused on other things. Once the wedding was planned, I bought a condo. And then I hired a personal trainer to get my body into perfect shape. I worked out twice a day and lived on energy drinks. The day I got married, my weight had hit a new recent low, not medically anorexic low, but 25 pounds lower than it had been the year before. I was obsessed with my body and appearance. I ignored what was going on with Dick. He was secondary to my goals, really. I was determined to own a home, get married and then have a child. Never mind that Dick wasn’t the right partner. I mean, I was in love with him, or had been at one point. We just weren’t right for each other. I wasn’t rich enough to afford him or who I became when I was with him.

The week of the wedding, we flew out to Austin. Dick’s family lived there along with Winston and several other members of my dad’s family. The wedding was to be performed outside on the lawn at the Four Seasons, walking distance from the bridge with the largest bat population in North America. It was a beautiful setting with trees, a lawn, and the Colorado River right at the edge of the property, glinting in the distance.

It rained all day, every day, the week of my wedding, right up until the morning of May 1, 2005. The news that week was filled with updates on the search for Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, the woman who had run away from her home in Duluth, Georgia, a few days before she was scheduled to marry John Mason. She was finally found two days before my own wedding amid speculations that she had been kidnapped or killed. It turned out she had simply run away. Everyone was talking about it. The staff in the hotel gym joked with me about it. I was the blushing bride staying at the hotel.

The day of my wedding, I was relieved to see the sun rise, bright and full without a cloud in sight. I got up early and worked out, then ordered champagne and lox and fresh fruit for the bridesmaids and my mother as we put on our makeup and got ready. Dick’s sister was the last of the bridesmaids to arrive, two hours later than expected, so the first round of photos ended up being rushed.

After the photos had been taken, we went back up to the room. Guests were starting to arrive. The planner had promised to ensure that Dick and his groomsmen didn’t see us as we went back up. But, of course, we walked right into each other. The wedding planner apologized profusely. I laughed and kissed Dick on the cheek.

The ceremony went smoothly other than a quick ring mix-up. He’d accidentally put his temporary silver ring on my finger, and then, of course, mine didn’t fit him. But otherwise, it was the single most beautiful party I ever threw. Everyone danced and had a good time. My younger cousin Suzanne caught the bouquet. My father gave a speech that was the closest thing to an apology to my mother I have ever heard.

And then it was over.

We flew home the next day. When we got back to the condo, I looked at my life and nothing made sense. I immediately started using cocaine again after five years of abstinence. My personal trainer hooked me up. It was Hollywood, after all.

In the first six months of our marriage, Dick spent all the money he’d received for our honeymoon on booze, and then he got fired from his job for drinking. He told me he was laid off, but with the amount of drinking we were doing –not to mention his clonazepam –he wasn’t handling work all that well. Besides, he was drinking over the lunch hour and possibly before he even got to work.

We went into debt. I refinanced the condo. I would love to blame Dick entirely, but I had a cocaine habit and liked eating out at fancy restaurants and drinking expensively. We were supposed to be celebrating, right?

I think the only thing I really liked about being married was being able to flash my ring when guys were hitting on me. For a while, it was nice having Dick join me at work events and such, but by the time we got to our first Christmas seven months after the wedding, I found myself buying a gift and card for myself and having him sign it. All he really wanted to do was drink.

I did everything: paid the bills, cleaned the house, bought the groceries, managed the budget. I even painted the bedroom while he was asleep on the mattress in the middle of the room with tarps all around him.

He drank everything that was in the house. The first time he drank an expensive bottle of wine I’d bought to share, we argued a little but I let it go. Soon thereafter, I started buying stuff I knew he didn’t particularly like: mezcal and gin. Over time he drank those too.

He eventually got another job as a videogame tester, which didn’t pay as much as the salary he’d made as a production manager. It paid enough for him to drink and maybe chip in a sixth of the monthly mortgage payment.

One late, drunk Saturday night, we ran out of cocaine and I decided we ought to check out the strip club down the street on Sunset.  Our sex life was more or less nonexistent by this point, so it seemed like a good idea.

The experience was pleasant but they didn’t serve booze, so after a few dancers had performed, we left. As we were walking out the door, I went through my purse looking for the valet ticket and held my jacket out to Dick.

“Could you hold my jacket for a minute?”

“Why don’t you hold your own fucking jacket?”

And all of my frustration and pent-up rage came rushing out.

“Why don’t I hold my own FUCKING jacket? Let me see, let’s start with, I paid for the strip club. I pay the mortgage, I pay the bills, I do the laundry, I do the cleaning and you can’t be bothered to help me with my fucking jacket? FUCK YOU!”

The valet brought the car around and we both got in. I continued to yell at him. He’d ask me to let him out of the car. I’d stop and let him out, drive around the block and pick him up again. He’d get back in and I’d keep yelling, driving 50 miles an hour down residential streets. He’d ask me to let him out. I’d stop. He’d get out. I’d skid out the tires driving off, then circle back around.

“Hey, get in again. I’m not done yelling at you!”

He got in the car for maybe the fifth time and we both looked at each other and started laughing.

“It’s kind of funny. I told you to get in so I could yell at you some more and you did.”

“Yeah, I did.” We smiled at each other.

Driving up the hill to our home, the oil light came on in the car. Apparently I’d busted the oil pan going over a dip in the road. I drove the car all the way home and damn near destroyed the engine.

Abusive relationships, bulimia, Drug addiction, emotional anorexia, identity, love, recovery, sexual trauma

Tiger’s Blood Social Club

About the time Jimmy got out of rehab, Sammy leased a space in Alameda that would become Tiger’s Blood Social Club. I had gotten in the habit of taking Jimmy to see Sammy in the hopes that maybe he’d decide to stick it out with his recovery. At first I’d drop Jimmy off and figured the two of them would talk. As time wore on it became clear that that wasn’t happening, so I went with him.
Truth be told, I missed Sammy. I missed my conversations with him. From the day I met him he became one of the few people in the world with whom I felt compelled to be completely honest. He didn’t judge me. He made me feel safe. The first time I met Sammy, Jimmy had had me call him to join us at the sober living facility where he was living then, introducing him as his sponsor.
Sammy drove up in his brand spanking new black Camaro, wearing the old-school punk uniform. Jimmy had come up with a sponsor from my world. It turned out that not only was Sammy a member of my extended punk family, but one they’d all revered. I mean, we’d listened to a whole lot of Fang back in Goleta. Over the years Sammy had met a lot of my people and befriended some. Of course he knew Bruce and Fraggle. Although Jimmy had known Sammy longer, Sammy was in my corner.
By the time I walked into Tiger’s Blood for a tour it was really close to opening. I fell in love with the space immediately. It was beautiful. It had huge skylights, a wide-open space in the middle with white and black squares in the linoleum flooring, punk music blaring, and some fantastic art on the walls.
I had just started thinking about renting an office space for myself. Working from home wasn’t working anymore. Having my art studio in the kitchen was getting messy. But more than that, I was living almost entirely in isolation with the exception of my visits to Beer Revolution.
There were two empty offices inside Tiger’s Blood. I’d always wanted a space to make art and now I needed an office for my business too. It took me a while to figure it all out. The first thing was that Sammy wouldn’t give me a key to the office unless I broke up with Jimmy. He was pretty standoffish about the whole thing. But once Jimmy and I broke up, we quickly came to terms on a rental fee and he installed some track lighting. I was in.
Not long after I moved in, he caught me at a burrito place around the corner and asked to join me.
“Of course. Have a seat.”
“I promise I wasn’t stalking you.” And he grinned at me. I laughed a little.
“Okay.”
“You know you can do a lot better than Jimmy.”
“Yeah, like someone with an actual job.”
“Well, among other things. It’s possible that Jimmy will never recover. He doesn’t want to be clean. He doesn’t see any reason to do so.”
“And he sure doesn’t want to stop breaking into places either. He thinks he’s too smart to get caught. Mostly he’s right.”
“People like him don’t think they can learn from anyone. They’re the ones who rarely make it.”
“I get it, I really do. It makes me sad, but I get it.”
I’d spent years dancing around psychiatrists myself, never letting them in. And right then, right after breaking up with Jimmy, my guard was up so high that the best anyone could do was say a word here and there and hope I was listening, maybe give me a hug.
For the first year I had my office in Tiger’s Blood, I hid. I had picked up a sales role that had me commuting to Burlingame a few days a week. The other days I spent holed up, office door shut.
I’d wander out to the shop floor from time to time, as unobtrusively as possible. Whenever I felt as though I was the least bit in anyone’s way, I’d apologize, pull my hands up to my chest, curl my shoulders and drop my head as though I could disappear if I tried hard enough.
Tommy was the first to break through that wall. He was my age, my height, and going through what looked to be a pretty traumatic breakup.
He’d run into my office, shut the door behind him and look around as if to check out my desk before crawling underneath it and toying with the idea of eating me out. The thing was, I knew he wasn’t serious. Even though it was totally inappropriate, it made me feel a little bit better. It made me feel as though maybe I wasn’t completely undesirable. Those days I barely recognized myself in the mirror. I was too disgusted with my body: the way it looked, felt and smelled to masturbate.
I’d crashed my own business trying to rescue Jimmy from himself, carrying myself along with serving, sales, and teaching jobs as I maintained the few clients still willing to work with me. I’d quit caring about my appearance. I’d let the gray grow into my mousy, dark blonde hair. My foot still hurt too much from the foot surgery to walk let alone run, so I drank instead. I blocked out the voice in my head that loved me along with the voices of all my friends and family.
I doubled-down on self-destruction in every way except for one. I decided that I needed to be celibate for a year. I recognized that my relationship with myself was bad enough that I had no business bringing anyone else in.
For the first time in my life I knew that maintaining celibacy was a matter of life and death. I’d even chosen to move to a studio apartment with very questionable privacy as insurance against my baser instincts. Now it feels a little stifling, but it was without a doubt necessary at the time.
Even with that, it didn’t mean I didn’t need a little bit of attention. Every now and again I’d realize some guy was flirting with me on the shop floor and I’d run into my office and hide.
But the people in the shop were nice to me. Over time, the little smiles, kind words, and lack of judgment drew me out. The people in the shop showed me kindness and compassion. All of them, this motley group of tattoo artists and piercers, mostly guys. But there was a young woman in the shop too, Casey.
Casey was in her late twenties and had a very distinctive art style that featured mythological figures and the symbolism of tarot decks with her own raw pain and vulnerability.
And yet, I don’t remember what she said the first time we talked, just the feeling that she cared. It felt really, really good.
I saw so much of myself in her, even though our lives had been very different. Mostly it was because of the way she carried herself. She frequently hunched over and held her hands across her stomach. She wore giant sweatshirts that covered most of her body, but short skirts and revealing tops. It was all very familiar.
But everything about the shop was familiar. I’d chosen to move in there because it was the closest thing to the compound I’d lived in with the skate punks in Goleta after Jimmy and I had broken up the first time. There was always the sound of a tattoo gun, punk rock playing, and lots of punks in and out of the shop. Except the punks here were sober. And even a few of my former housemates (now sober) showed up from time to time. I was home.
I often wondered if they knew how and why I’d ended up there. My best guess was that they’d assumed Sammy had met me in rehab or at a meeting or something. That was pretty close to the truth, but my recovery was from so much more than drugs or alcohol or my eating disorder. I was broken, my identity shattered into so many pieces I wasn’t sure how to put them back together or if it was even possible.
One night, after a long day of working, maybe three months after I’d moved in, I walked over to Casey and Tommy. “Thank you for making me feel welcome.” And I got teary-eyed and could barely finish my sentence before I choked up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cry.” And Casey gave me a hug. I cried some more, but then backed away and took off.
After that, every now and again I’d talk to Casey a little, but mostly I still kept to myself. She treated me kindly, as though I were a good person with something to offer. As if I was one of the cool kids I’d always wanted to be.
Every now and again there’d be a humorous interlude from Tommy, popping in my office and crawling under my desk to make sure it was “okay.” Still inappropriate, but completely safe and flattering. If I said stop, he’d walk back out of my office and shut the door. No one had looked at me like that in an exceptionally long time. Or maybe I’d stopped paying attention.
One day Casey was sitting in the back of the shop on the big blue leather sofa, writing. She told me she was writing her sexual inventory, to which I quipped, “If I ever decide to do that, I think I’m really going to write it. As a book. Sex sells.” And Sammy just kind of looked at me and grinned, “Yep.” As much as he’d heard Jimmy’s stories, he’d never heard any of mine. Neither of them had any idea I might actually be serious about the book, let alone going back into recovery and writing an inventory.
Writing about my sexual misadventures had a fair amount of appeal, in an inventory or any other format. Beyond that, I thought it just might end up being profitable in a way that my writing about bulimia probably wouldn’t be. I had no idea how painful this book would be to write. But I am glad I started writing anyway.
The good news was that I was surrounded by people in recovery. They seemed a whole lot happier than I was, with my eating disorder raging in the background. Not that I wasn’t doing some things right: I wasn’t having sex. I hadn’t dabbled with meth in months. I barely drank. Mostly I was bingeing and purging and taking laxatives and diet pills. I even tried going on a diet for a month before I finally took a leap of faith.
The day I gave it all up I was sitting in my office at Tiger’s Blood looking at bottles of diet pills and diet books. I had a giant blank piece of wood and started laying everything out on top. Most of the diet pills were brown, so the first thing I did was paint them pink. Then I took some of the gummy diet candies and coated them with glitter. Then I took a stack of women’s magazines and started tearing them up before I hit the mother-lode of images of Barbie puking into toilets, doing drugs and fucking up, right there in Cosmopolitan.
The only things I was missing were chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax, enemas, and my personal favorite, cocaine. I walked across the street to CVS and bought a little mirror, some white eyeshadow, superglue and a box of Ex-Lax. For the enema, I printed out a JPEG of an ad for a Fleet enema. The cocaine I made with the eyeshadow, adding a rolled-up dollar bill on the mirror for good measure. When I was done, I spelled out the word “Stop” in pink-painted diet pills across the entire piece.
That piece of art is my marker of the day I stopped. I quit drinking Diet Coke and energy drinks and didn’t buy another bottle of diet pills. I didn’t measure another meal or count calories again. It’s been a couple of years now. It might not sound like a lot after 28 years of bulimia, but it’s what I have. I’ll take it.
No one knew that I was doing this. I was in a recovery group where it would have been appropriate to talk about this, but the only thing I did was share the art piece. I was too afraid of telling anyone. I rarely talked about my eating disorder to begin with, not with my therapist or in one of the meetings with my fellow recovering bulimics, except to state that I was walking away from the one thing that had always been there for me, the one internal struggle that was totally and completely mine. I didn’t want to fail publicly. My relationship and breakup with Jimmy had been performed with a huge audience: our neighbors had witnessed our shouting matches, my professional peers knew about his multiple arrests and everything I’d done to help him, and worst of all, my friends had seen me crying: obsessed and afraid of his rejection up until the day I finally broke up with him. I never wanted to face that shame again. Plus, there were always people who told me nothing was wrong with me. They’d take one look at me and assume everything in my life was hunky-dory.
I did finally open up a few months later. To Casey, my tattoo artist when she tattooed a giant rose on my left ass cheek. It was a gift to myself for my forty-second birthday. As a fan of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” I viewed forty-two as the meaning of life. This would be my meaning-of-life year. To me, the meaning of life would be all about stepping into myself and being the wonderful, intelligent, charming, and loving person I knew I could be.
I wanted a rose tattooed on my ass as a reminder to bloom. But not just any rose. I wanted the rose from the Mutiny In Heaven album cover by the Birthday Party. My life had come full circle. I’d hit bottom twice, dating the one man most like my father. Except that this time, I knew I could recover. I replicated the circumstances to the best of my abilities, but this time, there were people in recovery, including many of the friends I’d left behind when the heroin had rolled in over twenty years before. The experience back then had been very much like being cast out of heaven. The song that came to symbolize that whole period for me was “Mutiny in Heaven”. My friends and I had become the fallen angels, imperfect, or maybe totally fucked up, but ready to fight to keep the rest of our extensive punk family alive.
This was the rose I wanted. It captured my story as nothing else could. And Casey was the woman to do it.
I had to come clean with her. I told her, “I hate my ass.”
“But you have a perfect ass.”
And once she drew up the cover artwork and placed it against my skin, I saw what she meant. My ass was the perfect canvas for the tattoo. It was perfect. It still is. I’ve learned to love my ass and every memory that piece of art represents.

Abusive relationships, Bipolar Disorder, Drug addiction, emotional anorexia, love, recovery, sexual trauma

The Second Time’s the Charm

My only way out of Chico was to move to Alameda in 2012. I didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles. I felt as though that town had chewed me up and spit me out. It was the town of my failed attempt at the American Dream – my condo sold, my marriage ended.

Aside from the joy I received from mentoring my employees and spending time with my cat, George, my life in Chico was pointless and isolating. Once I’d decided to quit drinking, I started writing again. I wrote “A Shame for Shame” and “Please Forgive Me.” I edited a lot of the old stuff and started posting all of it on Facebook.

I posted “More” with a reference to a poem that Jimmy had written twenty years before, crediting him. And that’s how he found me.

I’d looked for him online over the years, always wondering what had become of him. Had he joined a band? Written a book? I never took it all that seriously. I halfway expected to learn that he’d died. Or left the country. When I posted my writing to Facebook, I didn’t expect anything would happen. I mean, I had maybe twenty people reading my posts.

He sent me a Facebook message. This happened a few days after I’d negotiated a six-month consulting gig with my employer in Chico. I was about to move to the East Bay, which was – surprise, surprise – where Jimmy was living. And he was single. We talked on the phone for hours, texted, and messaged. He sent his latest recordings.

And then I drove down to see him and to start looking for an apartment on my birthday, August 24, 2012. I had a room at the Oakland Marriott Downtown. After I checked in, I went to pick him up in Ghost Town. I was standing outside of my car when I saw him. I ran over and jumped on him, wrapping my legs around him as we kissed. I remember it so vividly, the aqua of my jeans against his dirty black ones, the way he smiled at me. I hadn’t seen a smile like that directed my way in a long, long time.

We got back together. Right then and there. I mean, we spent one night apart. He was off for a night of “work” – in his case, breaking into a vacant building to remove anything that could be sold or scrapped.

At the time, I was okay with it. I mean, I’d short-sold my condo. I’d watched as the banking industry stole the American Dream out from under so many hard-working people. The thought of Jimmy ripping the insides out of these vacant, repossessed buildings gave me no shortage of satisfaction.

After he left, I was off for a night of wild sex with a guy I’d met at the Phoenix a few weeks before. I’d set that up before I’d made the date with Jimmy. Besides, Jimmy didn’t judge. If anything, he would think it was hot.

Two days later, he sent me an email that read, “I love you, and it fills my heart with unaccustomed joy that you love me in return.” I was completely swept up into the illusion of our love.

That I fell in love with Jimmy a second time around doesn’t surprise me. I thought Jimmy was my soul mate. The very first time we made love back in 1992, he’d taken the rose he’d bought me and broken off the petals, laying each one down on his sleeping bag in a tent way up in the Berkeley Hills. He read me some of his poetry, played me one of his songs. We watched the sunrise over the bay, the sun glinting off the BART cars.

Jimmy knew how to seduce. He made dramatic gestures. If we walked into a place with a piano, no matter how out of tune, he’d play me a love song. He held my hand and kissed me in public. No one had done anything like that since my husband, and even then, only at the very beginning of our relationship.

Jimmy hand-carried every single item from the apartment in Chico to the apartment in Alameda. He even drove the U-Haul truck. We talked about my book, his music. He composed and recorded songs while I wrote. I told him that this time when I wrote about him I would say nothing but good things. I lied, but mainly to myself. I wanted so much to believe in our love. We would finish writing the book together. It would be an amazing love story, even though I hated the romance genre and the cultural significance placed on it.

For the first time since my divorce, I made a home of that apartment in Alameda, complete with an area for him to compose and record music, and an area for me to write. He brought furniture and sculptures and art and books. He even got me a drafting table when he learned I wanted to start creating art again. We filled the apartment with everything we needed to pursue our creative endeavors. We filled the apartment with love, and it was everything I imagined it could be.

Jimmy helped with the cooking, the cleaning, and even the laundry. He snuggled with my cat, George, and bought him cold cuts. He loved George as much as I did.

Of course, Jimmy smoked meth, but it didn’t bother me so much, probably because he mostly kept it together around me. I was grateful he wasn’t a drunk. And he supported me in not drinking, which seemed like a good thing, at least at first. He slept most nights, occasionally borrowing my car to go “work.” After a few weeks, though, he started disappearing, first for a few hours, then a day, then for days at a time.

He wouldn’t answer the phone or return my texts. I went to Beer Revolution, got drunk, and hooked up with some guy I’d met a few times. The next day, Jimmy came back with gifts. He always brought gifts, thoughtful gifts like books of transgressive fiction or classical music CDs.  I didn’t want to know too much about how he spent his time. I figured he was getting high and breaking into buildings. I didn’t think he was starting a family with someone else while screwing yet another woman he’d introduced to me. I also didn’t think he was breaking into places where people lived and worked.

Jimmy knew everything about me and loved me anyway. He accepted and encouraged my rage toward my father. He’d met him and even ripped him off once. I loved him for that. More than that, I loved the detailed, philosophical, moral, and literary tangents we went on. We were at the same level intellectually, which is something I’d rarely experienced in dating. In friendships, of course, but never in romance. It was a huge turn-on for me.

After a few months, he tired of me. I didn’t share his love of commercial burglary or meth. And I wasn’t a skinny brunette with big tits. His friends were quick to point that out: how different I was from all his other women.

I got to know his type and I attempted to become more like it. I met one of his girlfriends, Cindy, who was perfectly styled, slender, and had freshly manicured gel nails. After he made fun of my nails a few weeks later, I started getting my nails done.

I started obsessing about my weight, again – with vigor. Enough so that I decided doing small amounts of meth would be okay since I couldn’t find a reliable source online to purchase phentermine. No doctor in his or her right mind would prescribe that for me, and I knew it. I hated meth, but I wanted to be thin. I’d do the tiniest amount first thing in the morning when it was around. I had to be able to sleep at night. And when it wasn’t around, I used laxatives, over-the-counter diet pills, anything to destroy my digestive system so I wouldn’t eat. I was so afraid he’d leave me if I wasn’t pretty or thin enough. The same fear my dad had put in me.

I lost ten pounds and got my look together. I was way off emotionally, but I was managing to maintain my business. I was mostly isolated, but had a psychiatrist. Seroquel got added to the Effexor-lamotrigine mix. Seroquel is an antipsychotic that also happens to be a marvelous counter to meth, reducing some of its more pronounced side effects. No doubt the psychiatrist had noticed the time or two I’d shown up high.

Come February, I went to New York for a series of meetings. I was on my way to my room at the Pod 51 Hotel when I got a call from one of my clients letting me know it would be my last month consulting for them. They’d already hired my replacement.

I called Jimmy. He didn’t answer. I sent him a series of texts, including a few nudes, hoping to get a response. Nothing.

After settling into my room, I walked down and around the corner to Dos Caminos and ordered a Cadillac margarita, texted again. I ate dinner, drank a few more margaritas, then went back to my hotel room and called.

“Hello Cat.”

“Why didn’t you call me back? I lost my consulting gig in Chico. I could use your support right now . . .”

“You’re drunk.” And he hung up on me.

I spent the next hour calling him, he’d pick up the phone, yell into the receiver, then hang up.

When I landed in San Francisco, he was a few minutes late getting to the airport. He helped me put my suitcase in the trunk, but then, when I got in on the passenger side, I spotted lotion and mascara that were not mine. He turned the engine off.

“Who does this belong to?”

“Oh, I had to give Cindy a ride.” Cindy was a beautiful brunette with whom he frequently texted. Once Jimmy got to Santa Rita jail, I found all kinds of nude photos of her on his laptop mixed in with our videos and such. They’d been an item throughout our entire courtship period, and even now, now that he lived with me, depended on me.

“You sure you only gave her a ride in my car?” I wondered if he’d taken her back to our place too, fucked in our bed.

“Look, Cat. Fuck you. She needed a ride.”

“No wonder you wouldn’t talk to me.” I started crying.

He jumped up out of the driver’s side and walked back to a truck that had pulled up behind my car, driven by a friend of his.

I was sobbing as I ran back to him, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Oh, poor you. I’m playing the world’s tiniest violin for you and your personal pity-party.”

And they drove off in the truck. I called and called and called and he wouldn’t answer. I sent him texts. I threatened to end it, then asked him to meet me in the City for dinner. Then I told him to get his shit out of the apartment – and he did.

I was greeted by George when I got home, but I couldn’t stop crying. I held him in my arms and let him lick my face, but it wasn’t enough. Jimmy had become my everything. And now, with the loss of my main client, my business was fucked as well.

I look back and think that if I could only have handled that week of isolation better, been strong enough to stand alone, I might have made it through. But I talked him into getting back together with me a week later. We met up at the hotel room he’d rented when I kicked him out, one of those weekly rental spots off MLK in Oakland. We lay down on the bed and he held me and told me he loved me. He said that his relationship with Cindy was ephemeral, while I was the real deal. I bought it, even though I saw many of her things in that room, a scarf thrown across a lamp, various toiletries in the bathroom.

At least I didn’t let him move back in, but we were together. He’d come to see me maybe once a week, take a long bath, and sleep for a day. I was so happy for the little crumbs of love he shared with me, the time we spent reading in bed together, the books he brought me, the songs he recorded. I loved watching him sleep, nude, with George curled up against him. I loved hearing him record, and watching as he mixed his music.

After not communicating for a week, I texted him and we met up at an Ethiopian restaurant on Telegraph. He was an hour late and had no appetite, but he made it. He was exhausted and you could see the pain on his face. When I was done eating, I asked him to come home with me, take a long bath and spend the night. He was being sweet and told me how much he missed me.

We were driving back to the apartment when his phone rang. A friend of his was in the hospital and needed his help right away. I asked who it was, offered to give him a ride to the hospital.

“No thanks. I’ll get there myself.” He said it angrily, as though I’d done something wrong.

“You run along to your own private little fantasy world.” I stopped at an intersection and he jumped out of the car, slammed the door, and took off running.

I called after him, crying, circling around the block after him. He ignored me and disappeared for a few days without calling or texting.

A few days later a friend of his posted a note on Facebook: “Congratulations on the birth of your beautiful daughter, Abigail.” He’d run off to the hospital to bring his daughter into the world with his supposed ex-girlfriend.

I opted to like the post. I wanted Jimmy to know that I would be supportive. I wanted him to know that my love was large enough. I called him, but he didn’t answer. The post was taken down.

A few days passed before he called me.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I wish you had felt like you could tell me. I love you.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

But he did hurt me. I learned from a mutual friend that he’d been taking care of his “ex” throughout the pregnancy. He was doing the right thing by her, I thought. Except that it turned out they’d never stopped seeing each other and had sex up to and after the pregnancy.

A few weeks later, Jimmy was arrested. He called to tell me he was in Berkeley Jail. He’d been caught breaking into cars. And, he’d been shooting up. I rushed to the jail before visiting hours ended.

“Cat. Thank you for coming.” He was high as all hell, but happy to see me, grinning widely, eyes so full of love.

“Of course. I love you.”

“I love you, too, Cat. They’re going to move me to Santa Rita soon.”

“I’ll come visit you.”

And I did. It took a bit of doing to figure out the lottery system at Santa Rita, but I got my visit scheduled and the day came for me to go see him.

Jimmy was happy to see me.

But he was high. He seemed as if he’d been high for days.

“You said you’d quit using if you got arrested.”

“Fuck that. You know I have no desire to quit using. Fuck you, Cat. You’ll end up fucking my shit up. You’re so stupid.”

“Really Jimmy? Well, fuck you too.”

And he got up and asked to be taken back to his cell. I cried all the way to Beer Revolution. Bruce was there to comfort me over numerous Belgian quads. Beer didn’t make it any better, but talking to Bruce did a little. It wasn’t as though he knew what to say, but he was kind.

I didn’t bring the subject of rehab up with Jimmy again until after his next court appearance. It was on that day that his sentence was read. He would be serving at least another six months. Jimmy didn’t want that.

I saw my in. I could get him six months of rehab. I believed it could fix him. When I went to visit him the following week, I was prepared to bring it up, but he beat me to it. It felt like a miracle. I posted as much on Facebook. And then I reached out to his public defender.

The next time I went to court, I was prepared. I always dressed carefully when I went to court. I had been raised by an attorney, after all. I knew the drill. I didn’t break out the full monkey suit, but I wore a blazer and scarf with my jeans. I looked and acted in a professional manner. I was put together. The public defender was taken aback.

“Usually my clients don’t have someone like you,” was what he probably said. “You know that to make this transition to the drug courts, with nothing on his record about drug use or possession, you may be called upon to testify.”

“Yes.”

“And you have seen him use?”

“I have. Thank you so much for working with me on this.”

“There are no guarantees.”

“I know. It’s the one thing I can do.” And it was. I hadn’t been able to do this for Josh, but here I was doing it for Jimmy. I had the opportunity to redeem myself. I could save love.

It took a few court appearances before the public defender was able to get Jimmy’s case transferred and to get him into rehab. But it happened. Jimmy called when he was on his way. I was so excited. I would get to see him, even if only for a moment.

I drove to the rehab facility with his hooded robe and a bunch of toiletries. I’d taken the time to read the labels to find products they would let him have, mostly Neutrogena and Dove for men. Nothing cheap was alcohol-free. I wanted him to know that I loved him. I bought him the best damn toiletry products I could afford.

And I caught him just before he was taken upstairs to his room. We hugged and kissed before one of the counselors separated us. He would be okay. We would be okay. Six months of rehab and we’d be together again. He’d be sober.

Our love didn’t seem quite so crazy anymore. I quit sleeping with other guys. I worked on my own sobriety, slowly going off my psych meds and learning to meditate. He was writing short stories and sharing them with me. I was holding down a handful of part-time jobs and representing a few clients to make ends meet. He’d be home soon. He promised to help so I could get back to writing too.

Then he finished rehab and moved home. He frequently asked for money. He yelled at me whenever I asked him about his job search. He never went to meetings. He said he was fine and was around less and less.

He’d been home about a month when I finally went to see my doctor about a lump in my belly. It was uncomfortable, but I didn’t figure it was anything major. I went in for the ultrasound to investigate the lump on the same day I went in for my first mammogram.

I lay there on the table as she rubbed jelly on my tummy and started moving the wand over it.

“You poor thing. You must be in so much pain.”

“What do you see?” And I expected there might be a small benign tumor or a cyst.

“There’s a mass the size of a football.  She handed me the wand to the ultrasound so I could see it.

And there it was, an enormous, amorphous mass.

“Do you have a gynecologist for me to send these images to?”

“No.” I had to hop on the phone that afternoon to find one. The pain hadn’t been much, but now that I’d seen the image, I was scared. I found a gynecologist within a few hours and was booked for surgery on the following Tuesday. I’ve always had that kind of drive. If someone needed a person to go push boulder “x” up the hill like Sisyphus, I was the one to come recruit. But I rarely did it for myself. It was always for some guy or other. My dad, Jimmy, Dick, whoever.

The day of the surgery, I gave Jimmy money to buy me a dozen pink and yellow roses. I told him exactly what to buy for me, and he did. He added a card that said “I love you” in kanji. It was the little things like that that I loved so much about him. Never mind that I was back to buying gifts for myself, acting out the same charade I’d played with my husband.

I attended yet another tradeshow in Las Vegas, the biggest show of the year for my industry. I was representing five clients and had my business partner, Pamela, with me to help with all the meetings. Business wasn’t great, but it was good. It was paying the bills, a suite at Vdara and plenty of fancy client meals.

Around midnight on the first night of the convention, I got a text from a friend of Jimmy’s. He’d been arrested. My car had not been impounded, but was parked in one of the tougher parts of Richmond, about fifteen miles away from Alameda. His friend was going to get it for me, and, since Jimmy would still be in jail, she’d come pick me up at the airport.

I spent the next two days in between meetings trying to figure out if I needed to bail Jimmy out. Every little opening, I’d find myself on the phone – with my mom, with a bail officer, with Jimmy’s friend – trying to sort out what I should do. Everyone told me to let Jimmy go. But I didn’t. In the end, I didn’t bail him out either, which was a good thing because he was let go the day I got back in town. Just in time to help me with another surgery, this time on my left foot.

What they do in a bunionectomy is break a bone or two, attach them with a small screw, stitch you up and send you on your way until the cast is ready to come off.

Except that, with mine, they needed a much larger screw because the bones refused to reset. And then they had to remove a bunch of tissue around the second toe because it had developed hammertoe from all that extra pressure. Walking was extremely painful. I’d had to quit running entirely. I missed the running the most, that feeling of flight coming down the slightest incline as one foot barely touched the ground before the other came gliding down.

The podiatrist told me he’d never seen a bunion so pronounced. It was obvious to him that my foot had started to deform itself when I was about twelve. I wondered if it had developed from all the years I’d spent hunched over, walking pigeon-toed with my arms wrapped around the front of my body, afraid to reveal myself. The podiatrist said it was genetic.  I’d worn boots so many years, I knew it wasn’t the footwear.

After my surgery, I needed a lot of help around the house, with laundry, grocery shopping, and cleaning. At first Jimmy was good about helping, but as the weeks wore on, he stopped. He was busy getting high and breaking into buildings.

Then he started spending time with his ex. Though Abigail had been adopted, the two of them visited her together. After the first visit, they started scrapping together. It was something they both loved. They’d always been a team. And when it was all done, of course they fucked and smoked meth. That was their reward, the point of the whole exercise.

To Jimmy I’d become boring. And needy. I knew our relationship was over when he stopped sharing music with me. He’d never forgiven me for the two weeks I couldn’t have sex with him after the first surgery. He no longer called me “honey” or “sexy” or “Cat,” but instead “sexless drama.” And I had lost interest in having sex with him. Sex with him was something I did because he forced me or guilt-tripped me into it. I’d lie there doing everything I could to get him to come quickly. We never kissed anymore. There was no foreplay. Fuck, there wasn’t even lube. It was painful – emotionally and physically.

I became glad when he didn’t come around. My friends urged me to break up with him. They didn’t like him. They didn’t like seeing me so distraught, especially Carrie.

Jimmy looked bad. Carrie was the first to tell me so. He’d lost a lot of weight in the few months since he’d gotten out. He had that horrible oniony cat-piss stench that meth heads exude. He rarely showered or brushed his teeth. And when his ex was arrested, he asked me for money to put on her books and I gave it to him. I was literally out the door to another tradeshow in Vegas when he asked. He was my ride to the airport.

While I was in Vegas, I tried to call but he wouldn’t answer. I had taken our shared iPad, loaded up with the decks for my meetings, plus my emails. When I went to check for my emails, there were several of his mixed in. He’d left his account on there. There were emails between him and Abigail’s grandmother going back and forth, talking about music, his “recovery,” how much he loved being a father. It was painful to read such elegant lies.

Jimmy showed up at SFO on time, but was high as hell. Maybe he’d been high since he dropped me off a few days earlier. His driving was erratic and terrifying. We almost hit a few cars merging from the right onto the Bay Bridge.

We got to Alameda somehow, when I finally confronted him about the emails. He yelled at me about how jealous and crazy I was.

“Everything’s fine, you’re just fucking crazy.”

Then he jumped out of the car and started walking down the middle of the street. I yelled at him for a few minutes to get back in the car, but finally left him there, wandering down the street, facing oncoming traffic.

He made it home a few hours later, kissed me on the cheek, and immediately passed out. I was far from okay, but happy to see him sleeping at least.

A few days later, my cast came off just in time for a giant memorial celebration for Fraggle that Sunday, the day of my forty-first birthday. Throughout the entire time that Jimmy was in jail and rehab, Fraggle had been there for me with bottles of fancy beer, silly facial expressions and always, always an abundance of metal chains around his neck. He introduced me to all his friends. And they were all there: Carrie and Bruce and the rest of Fraggle’s posse. I spent the whole day at Fragglefest, soaking in the love and support of this community that had so willingly adopted me. And then, when it was over, I left to go see Jimmy.

I wanted to have one last night together before I broke up with him. I was rather drunk. My judgment wasn’t necessarily the greatest.

We got a room at the Waterfront Hotel in Jack London Square. It was the worst room I’d ever gotten there, off to the side in the new wing: handicapped shower, no tub, and fluorescent lighting throughout

“Wanna take a shower with me?” That had once been a treat in our sexual routine.

“No. Not really. Go ahead.”

It was the first time he’d ever turned down sex. I felt naked under the stark lighting, cellulite blossoming on my thighs as I glanced in the mirror, the feeling of some invisible disease oozing from my pores that would never come clean no matter how much luxury body wash I used. I was ugly, disgusting, hateful.

I had found my bottom. There was nowhere that I could go from here but up.

 

(With apologies to Ben Mendelsohn – he looks like a cross between Jimmy and my father.)

Drug addiction, emotional anorexia, identity

Games

I play the games I’ve been taught to play
To make my way past the edges of words.
Friday cocktails, diets and
Weekly starvation,
Cocaine;
Wanting the look that makes you want me.

Sex pulls me in deeper,
Sinking into my self-created world,
Incapable of understanding your words.

Those words you use
Just to get inside.

I use the same phrases, you know.
I win these games every time and
Lose a little bit of myself.

1998

#sexaddiction #isolation #cocaine #eatingdisorders #vulnerability#badboundaries #misconceptionsofself

abandonment, Drug addiction, emotional anorexia, identity, pop culture

Emptiness

Surrounded by the chaos of my possessions,

Smoke-stained walls plastered with faded photographs;

On the floor stacks of books.

Over the years my room has changed locations, holding me in like thoughts in conversations.

I am here, still;

A nearly empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose in my hand, cigarette burned down to the filter.

 

I am the unwanted gift left behind by men who couldn’t find enough room for the refuse of their lives.

Men who left me alone to drink, wanting a woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t think to match their own lack of substance.

 

I am an outdated model of a mastered game; trapped inside my own body.

There are dark circles under my eyes from too many wasted nights.

 

I am ignorant of abuse;

A happy and willing slave to the next man to notice my stone-blue eyes, the curve of my hip, the movement of my lips as I slowly inhale smoke from my cigarette.

 

Once,

I imagined I was beautiful, a man unwrapped me;

My body, not my mind.

I woke up to an empty bottle and a man I couldn’t remember next to me forcing his hand down my pants as my head spun.

 

I lie here pretending I don’t feel the pain,

Drinking, popping pills, eating chocolate.

I am a living, breathing stereotype, barely able to stand as I pull a pair of jeans over my widening hips, hold in my stomach as I zip myself into costume,

A little eyeliner, face powder, lipstick to complete the task

And I hardly recognize myself underneath this mask

Or remember who I was to begin with.

1993