Drinking those young wines is like raping a virgin! It’s a crime against humanity!”
That’s what Mutt Cohen said when he found out I’d polished off the entire 2000 vintage he’d sourced for me. It was inconceivable to him. He rubbed his eyes as if he’d suddenly been hit with a migraine from hell.
It took me almost a year to finish them off, and what a year it was! At its end, I was down to nothing but liquor and cooking wine!
I’d consumed enough of those French wines at my Casa de Claudia parties that people believed my cover story—that I’d drunk them out of spite with my friends because no one would give me a fair price. And like all good lies it was partly true. But I kept some parties in the dungeon private. Invitation only, just one name on the guest list. I fooled everyone. Except my mom. When she senses I’m hiding something, she’s like a German shepherd. She doesn’t stop until she’s sniffed out the lie and worked me into a corner.
“How did your party go last night, Claudia? Oh, you didn’t have a party? But you must have had one this week? No?”
Next thing I knew she was standing at my front door, cell phone in hand, recycling bin beside her, its lid flipped back to reveal a full load of bottles, clusters of glass necks and bottoms sticking out at every angle—my collection of shame.
But the monster was my partner in crime now, and she thinks fast.
“What? My gardener forgets to wheel the bin out for three weeks, and suddenly I’m a drunk? If anyone has the right to be indignant it’s me. What are you doing going through my trash?”
I invited her inside to make up. I had to keep her sweet, because I was flat broke and she was lending me money to help me hobble along with my mortgage. I managed to keep the house a little longer by convincing my mom that more work would come, but she was always badgering me about whether I had a job. I knew her charity couldn’t last much longer.
We had some tea. I was conciliatory. I told her that I understood how she could have made the mistake, but I’d appreciate it if she could keep her paranoid musings to herself.
She let the matter drop, but I knew it was a close call. After that I started hiding my empties inside a cabinet-model Victrola that movie photographer Robert Zuckerman had given me for my birthday. I used to play 1920s His Master’s Voice records on it, while inside its belly it kept Its Mistress’s Secrets. But secrets have a way of creeping to the surface. One day while my assistant Holly was helping me choose the last of my personal belongings to sell, she caught sight of the Victrola.
“What about this old thing?” she asked. “Any special reason you want to keep it?”
She tilted it to test its weight, and her question was answered by a muffled orchestra of teetering glass.
I came clean about my drinking problem; Holly was so understanding. She agreed to help me and, for starters, bought a latch and big brass lock for the cellar door, which she proceeded to secure with military efficiency. She locked it down and took the key with her. The next day, after finishing a bottle of cooking sherry that I’d tucked away in the kitchen cupboard, I had a great idea.
What the fuck am I doing drinking cooking sherry? Is this where I am now? Maybe I should go sit on the sidewalk and drink out of a paper bag. Maybe I should drink proper wine like normal people, or not drink at all. Right. I don’t have any money, and I can’t get into my cellar, so the only option is to just stop drinking.
I was glad that Holly had agreed to help me. This was progress. As Sun Tzu says, know yourself and know your enemy and in a thousand battles you’ll never be defeated.
Ten minutes later I was standing in my dungeon drinking a Château Lafite Rothschild straight out of the bottle, crowbar in hand, the brass lock hanging from a splintered door. There’s always another option.
My normal morning started with dry heaves. The previous night’s wine was no longer in my stomach, but my body kept trying to cast it out, and like a bad exorcist it failed every time. I’d be left exhausted, my muscles aching from the effort.
I was still getting offers for small roles in movies that my friends were making. There was never any real money on the table, but I took the jobs anyway, because I needed to keep busy and I needed to put on a good show to ensure my mom’s continued investment in my life.
I knew she had the money. She’d married a multimillionaire and continued to earn her own income as an interior decorator. My mother is an impossibly generous woman. She’s always helped her children out, but this time I was taking enormous advantage of her. I’d told her my mortgage payments were slightly higher than they actually were—to make sure I had enough money to drink on. Don’t get me wrong; I was working hard to stay sober between binges. I just never wanted to be caught dry. That was an unthinkable possibility.
And I expanded the development of my detox schedule. I’d have scheduled binges, orderly hangovers, and well-planned detoxes, arriving on set or at auditions disguised as my alter ego: happy, funny Claudia. It must be the German in me; I had the whole routine down to stopwatch precision. I was a highly functioning alcoholic, killing myself with utmost efficiency.
A binge would last anywhere from one to three days, and it would usually take me up to a week to recover.
By the time I’d finished off the last of the French collection (and nearly finished myself in the process) I was starting to behave erratically. I’d usually crave alcohol when I was PMS-ing, and when I satisfied the urge it supercharged my emotional irritability.
That’s when the monster came a-knockin’, and she had another great idea.
You’re very touchy of late, and your mom’s becoming suspicious. You need to ramp things up to make sure she keeps helping us. Now’s not the time for little lies—they’re the ones that catch you out. You need to drop the A-bomb, a nice big lie that’ll keep the wheels turning for a long time.
I rang up my mom in tears. Through heartbroken sobs I told her I’d had a bad pap smear. What’s more, I could never have children. Even worse, they were going to have to perform some kind of operation on me to cut out the cancer. The other end of the phone was silent for several seconds and then a flood of pity and emotional sympathy followed. Mission accomplished.
I was so fucking clever. That’s the addict’s brain at work. It convinces you that you’re not out of control, that your insane decisions are perfectly logical. It’s not a big-picture state of mind. You’re so busy covering all the angles, looking after all the little details, that you have no perspective, no idea of just how strange you seem to the people who love you.
It took my mom all of twenty minutes to penetrate my carefully constructed fortress of deception. I forgot she knew that my friend Trish and I shared the same gynecologist. She called Trish, asked for my doctor’s number, and got him on the phone. The doctor said he couldn’t share any patient information, but my mom countered with a whole “I’m so worried about my daughter, she won’t talk to me, I think she might be dying” routine, which led to the doctor basically implying that I was fine.
She appeared on my doorstep like an angry Valkyrie; the “for sale” sign went up in my yard the following week.
I figured this was it, that I’d finally hit rock bottom. I’d been found out, my mom knew that I was a fucked-up drunk, and I knew that after that stunt she’d never completely trust me again. One part humiliation, two parts mortification, one part depression—the Stone Cold Sober cocktail. It was time to clean up my act. I wasn’t going to add alcohol to that emotional mixed drink. I needed change. Now I couldn’t wait for the house to sell—it had come to feel like a giant coffin.
To help pass the time, I’d fill out alcohol tests in the backs of magazines and read up on alcohol addiction. Sun Tzu was right; I knew myself but not the enemy, and that wouldn’t win me jack shit. For instance…
Do you wonder if you’re an alcoholic? Try answering the following questions. If you answer positively to more than three, consider seeking professional advice.
1. Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but lasted only a couple of days?
A: Never. I’m five days into a week of sobriety right now. Wait. Does drinking after 5 p.m. count?
2. Do you wish people would stop nagging you about your drinking?
A: No one is nagging me. (They just gossip behind my back.)
3. Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another hoping that would keep you from getting drunk?
A: Nope, I’m a wino, period.
4. Have you had a drink in the morning during the past year?
A: Does a mimosa with friends count? Then yes.
5. Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?
A: Not really (those bastards!).
6. Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year?
A: Does sleeping with strangers and passing out at 8 p.m. count as a problem?
7. Has your drinking caused you trouble at home?
A: Nope, I live alone.
8. Do you ever try to get extra drinks at a party because you did not get enough to drink?
A: I’m usually the one throwing the party, so I can drink as much as I want.
9. Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want, even though you keep getting drunk?
A: I don’t really get drunk, just happy… a lot.
10. Have you missed days at work because of the drinking?
A: What work? I’m an actress!
11. Do you have blackouts?
A: Not that I can recall…
12. Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink?
A: Yes. I would be thinner.
13. Have you ever embarrassed yourself or someone else when drinking?
A: Possibly. Probably. Alright already—yes!
14. Do you drink every day?
A: Nearly. Mostly. Always.
Then at the bottom of the page I’d write things to crack myself up, like: “FUCK! THAT WAS EXHAUSTING. I NEED A DRINK!”
I was still running from myself and the reality of my disease. On the set of Babylon 5 we played practical jokes on each other all the time. Now I was becoming a big joke and I couldn’t even see it. I wasn’t working, but if an idle mind is the devil’s workshop, then I was at least keeping someone well occupied. When I was working fourteen-hour days on a TV series I never thought about drinking, and when I got home I’d never drink because I was too busy learning my lines for the next day. Now I had oceans of time filled with tiny islands of distraction, but those were slowly sinking as even the freebie jobs started drying up. I reached out for the bottle again, despite my promises to myself. I was too far gone to just stop.
I was sick of the Hollywood youth game, sick of the superficiality of the whole industry, and yet I found that I couldn’t wander too far from the phone. It was like some kind of underworld torture—chained to a stool beside an eternally silent phone, wine glass in hand, waiting for it to ring. That fucking phone was cursed. Each day it refused to ring, I’d feel that I was aging a year, slowly transforming into a crone. If only the phone would ring, the curse would be broken.
And then one day it did. It was computer animation studio boss Andrew Dymond, who I’d met a few years before at a convention in London. I was telling him my tales of woe (but not of drunkenness) when he said to me, “Well, I’m putting together a really low-budget sci-fi comedy over here. How would you like to come over and star in it?”
I was stunned, so overwhelmed with happiness that for a moment I was speechless. I think Andrew took my silence as lack of interest.
“Look, before you say anything, let me tell you the name of the character—Belinda Blowhard.”
Brilliant. I told him that if he could get me SAG scale there was a good chance I’d be interested. Inside I was the dazzled heroine of a bad romantic comedy proclaiming, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”
This was just the change I needed: A new country, a new starring role, a new sci-fi series, and comedy to boot! This was saving grace in action. With change comes hope.
I arranged to rent out my house short-term while my step father kept trying to make a sale. I was happy to let him manage it. After struggling to keep the house for so long, the finality of losing it was all too depressing, and I didn’t want to risk doing anything that might jeopardize my new job.
Unfortunately, the carefully executed system of binge-suffer-detox was not working as efficiently as it once had. I needed to sober up, but first I needed one last round of drinks before the bar closed. By then I only had bottles of cheap sherry and vodka in the cupboard. I could walk clear of the fallout of a wine binge within a week, but a binge on vodka was akin to a death sentence. Yet there was nothing else to drink, so I figured I’d dice with death and keep my fingers crossed. I crashed and burned big-time, and as I sat on my tiled kitchen floor, wasted and leaning up against my seafoam-green cupboards, I estimated that it would take me at least two to three weeks to pull clear of the vodka aftershock.
And then I remembered that I was due to visit my mom in Napa. I had already booked the flight.
You have to go. She’ll become suspicious if you pull out at the last minute. You can pull it off. Have another drink. That’s the world’s best hangover cure.
Shit! Mom was having a ladies’ luncheon and had made a big deal about my attending. Forget the silent phone—that was lightweight torment. Sitting through a rich women’s tea party while detoxing, that was a fate express-shipped straight from the deepest pits of the inferno right to my door.
But the monster was right. I couldn’t risk losing her support, not this close to starting my new life. I needed my mom to help prop me up until I could stand on my own again.
There was still a glass of vodka left in one of the bottles. I threw it down my throat and felt better at once. My nerves steadied; I could do it. That was it, my last drink. I was going to dry out. I’d white-knuckled it before and I could do it again. The women’s tea party was a bullet that I meant to dodge.
I couldn’t fuck up this visit at my mom’s, not after the last one. That had been a disaster of epic proportions.
On that occasion I thought I’d gone in prepared. I knew I was prone to drinking at my parents’ house. Family gatherings are always hot-buttons for me, so to avoid the awkward conversation when they noticed their booze slipping away at an alarming rate I supplemented my consumption with vodka that I’d smuggled in concealed in water bottles. I’ve never really liked hard liquor, but I needed something to numb me out.
My mom has given me a tremendous amount of love and support over the years, and yet she can be a very judgmental person. I’m no pushover, but all it took was one comment from her about my weight or my career to send me running for the bottle. I never felt that I was good enough in her eyes. I wasn’t thin enough or pretty enough or with the right guy or rich or famous enough. She wanted her children to be perfect physical specimens with perfect jobs, complete with perfect little families of their own. I guess it was a kind of German-clockwork fantasy, efficient little dolls popping out of the right window at the right time to hit the right bell, everything running smoothly. Add to that my sensitive nature and there was very little anyone could say that was critical without triggering me to drink.
We’d been sitting around the dinner table, my mom, my stepdad, and his son. I was slicing up my lamb chop, happily munching away, when my stepbrother asked if it was any good. I picked up a piece and fed it to him with no sensual motive in mind; I just wanted him to try some. I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my ankle and turned to see my mom’s narrowed eyes staring at me. She’d kicked me under the table.
“Stop that!”
I just smiled and kept on eating but inside the monster had been awakened and was already formulating what it considered an appropriate revenge. When we all went to bed I went and knocked on my stepbrother’s door, and I seduced him.
He was my stepfather’s adult adopted son, so there were no blood ties, and I didn’t break any laws, but just the same, it showed just how poor my judgment was. It turned out that he was an alcoholic, too, so we understood each other just fine. We combined our hidden stash of booze and partied on into the wee hours of the morning.
In the morning, after the shit storm had passed, I realized that I had an ear infection, which ruled out flying back to L.A. I was already legally deaf in one ear from an infection I had when I was a kid, so I was terrified of damaging my hearing even more.
My stepbrother offered to drive me to L.A., but my mom and stepdad commanded him to stay put and told me to get on the plane. Now it was his turn to stage a revolt.
“Screw this. I’m driving Claudia.”
He was living in their guesthouse, and they were employing him to landscape their garden.
“If you’re not here for work tomorrow then don’t bother coming back.”
He took me to L.A., and in doing so lost his job and accommodations. I felt guilty and invited him to stay with me. I understood where my stepdad was coming from. He was convinced I was on drugs and was just trying to save his son from getting involved with me.
So alcoholic stepbrother moved in, along with his wart-nosed mongrel called Pepsi. The party continued (stepbrother had some money set aside). I’ve never hated an animal in my life, not even Lucy, who tried to eat my face for lunch, but for the one exception of Pepsi. Whenever I’d go out she’d shit on my floor and chew my furniture. A collection of valuable Native American antiques that I’d been planning to sell ended up as Pepsi chew toys. Maybe she was the jealous type?
In a bout of sobriety I saw the stupidity of it, the rift this situation was opening up between my mother and me. Her marriage was under stress as long as it continued. So I told stepbrother the party was over and sent him and Pepsi on their way. He went back to doing what he did best—growing medicinal pot.
On the next visit to my mom’s house I was determined not to fuck up again. I was a rock. I was on the goddamn stairway to teetotaler’s heaven.
And now it’s four o’clock on the morning after the tea party, and my mom’s there for me again. She stands over me as I hang over a toilet bowl in her house, riding the last wave of a protracted vomiting fit.
The bullet I’d hoped to dodge had hit me right between the eyes. I drank a whole lot one night after an argument with my stepdad, and the next morning I was really sick. I decided to put myself on a forced detox, hoping I would snap out of it, but instead my body went into shock from the sudden alcohol deprivation. The upside was that I missed the tea party; the downside was that I suffered one of the toughest detoxes of my life. I hadn’t realized just how badly I’d poisoned myself. I lost motor functions and part of my vision. I didn’t know that by stopping cold turkey I was damaging both my body and my brain.
My mom didn’t understand just how bad it was for me. “Can’t you clean yourself up? Take a shower and come down to the party. It will do you good to talk to people.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“So, you’re not coming down to the party then?”
When the party was over, my mother returned to my side and watched me throw up bile. She was angry and confused, tears in her eyes. I was shaking like a leaf, hallucinating and crying. Shame and guilt aplenty, there was no shred of dignity to try to recover. I couldn’t even stand up; I was stuck on all fours like a baby.
“Claudia, I’ve had enough. I called Holly. She’s flying up, and we’re taking you to rehab. I’ve booked you in.”
I looked up from the bowl, clinging to it so I wouldn’t fall in. I had no fight left in me, no tricks up my sleeve. I could only manage one word: “Okay.”
It was that easy. I was desperate.
My mom went back to bed. I doubt she slept a wink. When the fit passed I managed to get up and limp down to the kitchen. You can’t sleep when you’re detoxing. You’re a human ant farm, busy little critters rushing around your body and mind driving you slowly crazy until you have to drink to make them stop.
I found an unfinished bottle of decent champagne and grabbed some chilled orange juice from the fridge. This would be my last drink. Seriously. The last one. So it might as well be a good one. I needed the drink to steady my nerves. I was determined that if I had to go into rehab, then I was going to drive myself, and I would drive myself out as well—out to the airport and off to my new job in merry England.
I mixed a killer mimosa and looked out the window at the view of my parents’ vineyards as I waited for the dawn. And I prayed. I prayed that God would heal me, that this really would be my last drink, that I could be set free from the cycle that was destroying not only me but my family.
The drive to the treatment center was a silent one. Holly and my mom sat in the back seat. All my energy was focused on shutting out the voice in my head telling me to turn the car around. Holly tried making conversation with my mom, who’d started mumbling away, mostly to herself, trying to understand how I’d ended up like this.
“You’re so beautiful, Claudia, so beautiful. Why do you want to do this to yourself?” And then she’d ask Holly, “Why doesn’t someone just make Claudia stop drinking?”
She couldn’t understand what I was going through. She thought I was weak. She thought that someone other than me might have been able to stop me. Holly didn’t tell her about the splintered cellar door and the crowbar and the French wines.
I said nothing. I was preparing for my latest role as a rehab junkie. I already knew what a rehab center looked like. I’d starred in Clean and Sober. It would be grimy, with dusty old couches and smoke-filled rooms. There’d be a Morgan Freeman guy, the supervisor who comes down hard on you when you’re tempted to relapse.
I was more than a little surprised when we pulled up to the swanky Bayside Marin rehabilitation center, a beautiful complex surrounded by majestic views. This was a far cry from the cellblock I’d been expecting.
I filled out the paperwork, peed into a cup, had blood drawn, and got a tour on the way to my private room. Someone asked me if I preferred tai chi or yoga in the morning before my organic whole-food breakfast. Fuck. I realized that, far from a place of last resort, this was in fact a resort.
“Mom, how much is this place costing?”
“Thirty thousand dollars, so you’d better get better.”
I knew the tests would come back clean. I metabolize alcohol fast, and aside from the mimosa I hadn’t had anything in my system for a few days. Perhaps Keith Richards and I share some DNA, I don’t know, but my hunch was right. The tests came back clean, and I was pleased as punch to tell my mom to let my stepdad know that I was an alcoholic, plain and simple, that I wasn’t on drugs, and that in future he could just shut the hell up when it came to making pronouncements about my health.
Sensible Claudia went in there with the best of intentions. I had a job. I’d always dreamed of living in London. This was a chance to fix things with my family, to prove myself to them, to get good and healthy again. I might even regain some semblance of sanity.
But the addict’s brain is wily. It’s got more tricks up its sleeves than MacGyver with a Swiss Army knife. Claudia’s plan was perfectly sensible, but somewhere in the back of my mind the monster had been making preparations for a jailbreak from the Rikers Island of rehab centers. Now all we had to do was escape from a day spa. I was an actress, a pretty good one if I do say so myself. Mere mortals would fall before my batting eyelids and proclamations of sobriety. I had played addicts; these rehab guys wouldn’t stand a chance.
I set up in my room, which was decorated entirely with the same shade of orange they use at Burger King, then headed off to do my downward-facing dogs and breathing exercises with the yoga teacher.
We’d meet once a day for group therapy around a kitchen table, talk about our feelings, and then have our meals. There was no one-on-one therapy except for a one-time psychiatric evaluation when we first went in.
They should have screened educational movies. Some footage of black, bloated livers would probably have done me a world of good. At the very least they should have shown Clean and Sober. At least it had something to do with why we were there. Instead, they screened feel-good Disney teen movies.
The food was good, but they had a no-sugar policy, which created problems. You’re a heroin addict, what the fuck do you care if someone slips you a Hershey bar? Sugar doesn’t trigger addiction, or if it does then it’s one of a thousand things that, taken to excess, can tip the scales in the wrong direction. Sex, eating, arguments, walking past a liquor store, being in a car accident, having a miscarriage, getting dumped, having a dog rip your face off, needing a cigarette, someone dying, moving house, and, if you really want to get finicky about the whole fucking thing, sure, eating a Hershey bar could do it, but it’s at the bottom of a very long list, right above too many cups of coffee.
The people who came to speak to us had between five and twenty years of sobriety, and none of them believed in anything except the AA system. You had to accept that you were an addict for life, repent to God, and surrender. That was the only choice—abstinence and daily or weekly meetings for the rest of your life. I wondered how atheists got sober. Or what if you were a Hindu? Do their gods manage alcoholism?
The shitty thing was that one girl was a bulimic alcoholic, I was just your plain, garden-variety alcoholic, another was a heroin addict, and another was a crystal-meth addict. Beam me up, Scotty; it just made no sense.
The problems of a hard-core heroin addict are not the same as those of someone with an eating disorder or an alcoholic. Your problems are not their problems. A doctor wouldn’t treat a cold, flu, and pneumonia all in the same way. The diseases might seem similar—they’re all respiratory diseases—but distinguishing between them and treating each appropriately can make the difference between life and death. It seemed to me that the bulimics needed their own group, to talk about body issues or if they’d been sexually assaulted. They don’t need to be hearing about the drinking problem of a thirty-eight-year-old actress with career anxiety.
There was an anorexic-alcoholic woman who kept weeping and saying, “I just want a pepperoncini martini at night. What’s so wrong with that?” She must have weighed seventy pounds. She couldn’t stop drinking, and that made her feel that she didn’t deserve to eat. She had a handsome, healthy-looking husband who’d come and visit her on family days. He’d hold her frail body while she wept from a mixture of shame and withdrawal.
There was this one gal who clearly had once been a real beauty but now was missing teeth from crystal meth use. Her skin was as rough and pockmarked as a pineapple. She couldn’t have been older than thirty-five but she looked fifty-five. One night she just climbed over the fence and walked to the nearest 7-Eleven. She came back from the other side with presents, her pockets loaded with candy, a sugar messiah reeking of beer and cigarettes.
I stashed my candy bars in my room along with some cookies I’d found hidden in the kitchen. If the sugar bug hit, then I was set. And if it turned out that rehab was more like prison than I thought, then I had a stash of currency at hand to buy whatever I needed.
Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a good thing. All human beings are addicts to their biology. If we don’t eat and breathe we get into serious trouble. Sometimes it’s a matter of choosing one addiction over another. Go to an AA meeting. There’s no shortage of smoking, and everyone’s eating copious amounts of sugar. Some of those guys are forty years sober.
The meth addict had a husband and kids who would come to visit, and my guess was that her $30,000 hadn’t come as easily as mine. Addiction possesses you. It takes you over. She’d lost her identity as a mother and wife, and however much she wanted it back, she couldn’t even stop herself from escaping rehab to get a smoke and a drink. How long would it be before she went back to the addictions she really craved?
After a few days, I felt great. They didn’t have to give me Librium, Valium, or any of the other drugs used to cope with alcohol withdrawal, because I completed most of the detox on my own. I started looking better; after a few days I was back to my old self. I signed up to go to the gym, but since they didn’t have one at the center they had to bus us to the nearest one, which was located next door to a liquor store. There’s some clear thinking for you. Now and again someone would come in to see who was working out, but there was nothing to stop me from strolling next door when they weren’t looking. I stood in front of the window and looked past the display of beer and spirits to the wine rack. I didn’t go in. I thought of the face of that young woman, her teeth gone, her skin all messed up. Then I thought of my mom. She’d be able to tell if I’d reoffended, and I couldn’t risk losing her again. Did I really want to be Iris from Clean & Sober?
It’s easy for many alcoholics to resist temptation in the first weeks after going sober. That high can last anywhere up to three months, but then the brain starts to crave what it has been missing, and the trench warfare begins again. And each time you relapse it gets worse. The body can’t go without its bad medicine. If I had been in rehab three months sober instead of three days, I’d have been the one sneaking back in, reeking of beer and cigarettes.
So I checked that the coast was clear, headed back to the treadmill, and stayed another week—a total of two in all—before I convinced myself that I was ready to leave.
Here’s how that happened.
There was this smug psychiatrist who did a personal evaluation of me during the second week. First, she told me I was highly sensitive. No shit; a grown woman who cries when her mommy tells her to lose weight. You bet I was highly sensitive. Then she told me I was antisocial.
“Antisocial? You wouldn’t say that if you’d been to one of my dinner parties.”
“I think you’re in denial about the seriousness of your disease.”
“If I didn’t think it was serious then why am I here?”
“I don’t know. Why are you here?”
It was like waving a red flag at a bull.
“You’re right. Maybe I shouldn’t be here at all.”
I walked out of there shaking my head.
You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Answering my questions with questions? That’s the best she’s got?
What does she know? She doesn’t know you. You’ve just hit a bump in the road.
The monster was right. I’d hit a whole string of them: the men in my life, the house, Lucy, and, worst of all, my failed career.
Sure, it’s been a bumpy ride, but now you’re clean, you’re sober. You’ve got a new job waiting. Why the fuck are you wasting your time in rehab?
And it didn’t help that rehab was boring. Rehab was about to beat my New Year’s Eve at Charlton Heston’s house as the single most boring time of my life. Chuck put on a kilt and made his guests eat Scottish food while sitting through the three-and-a-half-hour uncut version of Khartoum. It takes a lot to beat that.
I set about manipulating the staff.
“I have to go to England and start a new life. I need to make calls and find a place to live and coordinate being on a TV series.”
In no time at all I had my cell phone and computer access. Then I went into my counselor’s office and sat down opposite him.
“Thanks for the two weeks. I feel terrific, but I think I’m done here.”
“Why do you think that?”
More circular questions.
“Because I don’t want to blow the chance to go to the UK and star in a series. It’s not going to wait for me, and if I stay here and miss out then I definitely will start drinking again.”
“Well, legally, we can’t keep you here…”
“Oh. Fine. Well, if I’m not staying the whole thirty days I’d like to renegotiate the bill.”
That was it. I was out of there.
I went home and started packing. It didn’t matter that the monster kept pushing me toward the bottle. I didn’t need a drink. I didn’t need rehab. I was going to England, baby! Travel has always had that effect on me. I felt that if I could just get far enough away from my problems I’d be able to start fresh. No one knows you in a new country. The weight of expectation is gone. It’s an appealing idea and, as I said before, as with all good lies there’s some truth to it. But you can never escape yourself. You’re always there, looking back at yourself in the mirror; and when you’re dry the face you see there never looks quite right. It always looks like it could do with a good, stiff drink.
Moving to England felt like something of a homecoming. I’ve always been an Anglophile; it has to do with leaving Connecticut—its landscape and historical buildings—at a young age to move into tract housing in California. I’d learned to thrive in the new world, but my heart always yearned for the trappings of the old, and in that sense England was a cornucopia of distractions.
I’d arrived just in time to experience London in spring. There wasn’t a raincloud in the sky, and buildings that predated Columbus’s discovery of America were a dime a dozen. The British Museum became my second home; I soaked in the beauty of the antiquities that England had looted from around the world when they had ruled so much of it.
Old things make me happy, and now I was living in the heart of one of the great old cities of the world. Good old Claudia was back. I’d left that broken, needy excuse for a Claudia back in the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place where I could be neither free nor brave. In England I was the master of my destiny, riding the wagon of sobriety, whip in hand, driving its horses onward to a new and more promising horizon.
It had occurred to me that the UK wasn’t exactly the perfect country of choice for an alcoholic. After all, drinking is a national pastime. And I love pubs. I knew that was going to be an issue. I jokingly pondered moving to Saudi Arabia. It’d be much harder to get a drink, but, knowing me, I’d manage somehow and instead of getting stone cold sober I’d just end up getting stoned, literally.
So since the Middle East wasn’t an option, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back to my life in L.A., I decided that London would either make or break me. It was the battleground where the fight for the new Claudia would take place, and so far I was kicking ass and taking names. I was confident and filled with hope. I was so grateful to have another chance that minor temptations seemed like daisies in a field; I paid them no notice, flattening them as I passed.
After being so sick for so long, I knew it would take my body a long time to forget the experience. It’s like being forced to chain-smoke cigarettes until you turn green and throw up. You don’t want another cigarette. You don’t even want to think about smoking. That’s how it was with the monster and me. We’d broken up. She was like a persistent ex-lover who keeps on calling, wanting to get back together, but I wasn’t taking her calls. As far as I was concerned we had nothing more to say to one another.
It would take four more months before I worked out that I’d underestimated my disease and that I was dealing with something that was less like a persistent ex and more like a stalker who was willing to take me hostage to make her point.
The year is 3034. We have medically suppressed our emotions to stop illogical thoughts from interfering with our decisions.
Starhyke was great fun—it was like a Benny Hill movie set in outer space. Aliens called Reptids release a weapon that unshackles the passions of the crew of the dreadnought Nemesis, producing unintended consequences. And in the strange way that art mirrors life, I was playing a robotically sober character who struggles to control her unleashed desires.
I’ve always put acting before addiction, even at the worst of times, and now that I was working I had my armor back. It was slightly tarnished and dented, but it was mine and I was strong again. The monster wisely kept her distance.
The show had a great cast. Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett in the original Star Wars movies, was hilarious. And I got on famously with Suanne Braun, who had played the goddess Hathor in Stargate SG-1, and with Rachel Grant, who is an actress and an expert in Filipino martial arts. Everyone was very talented and enthusiastic.
It was a low-budget production. The food cost one pound per day per person, and boy, could you tell. Mystery-meat glop was the main course, and you couldn’t get a salad to save your life. But I knew I was in safe hands when it came to alcohol. Andrew Dymond, the director, and the majority of the crew didn’t drink, and when I went to the pub to socialize after work no one had a problem with my drinking Diet Coke.
At one point Andrew had some difficulties with the actors depicting the more intimate scenes. He asked me if I wanted to direct, and I jumped at the chance. Andrew directed the CGI and more technical scenes in the adjoining studio, and we developed a method for working in tandem that effectively allowed us to complete shooting on the entire first season. It was a great experience for me. I’d act in one scene and then jump over to the set next door to direct another.
In the storyline, Belinda Blowhard was battling the alien Reptids but failing to maintain control of her impulses, which was great fodder for comedy. By the time Starhyke production was coming to an end I could sense my inner monster was working on her own ultimate weapon. I’d have to do a better job of managing my passions than Belinda did. It was one thing to play a slapstick role and another thing to live it. I would not allow my life to become a farce.
When my monster did strike again I realized, too late, that I’d been preparing for the wrong kind of battle. I’d been expecting a frontal assault, something I could resist and perhaps overcome. In the meantime, the monster had been tunneling beneath the fortress walls, preparing a sneak attack.
It started with the affair I was having with one of the show’s executive producers. He was a very nice guy who’d lent me his flat in Bath while we were shooting the show. He was also a wine enthusiast. I figured that we had something in common, although I bet that no matter how much he knew, he wasn’t as enthusiastic about wine as I was. One day he invited me out to dinner, and I accepted, knowing there would be really, really good wine there and that he would offer it to me. That’s when the monster started whispering.
Claudia, you haven’t touched a drop in four months. You’re not an alcoholic, not even close. And this is an opportunity to prove to yourself that you’re not addicted. Just drink small quantities of the best stuff. Trust me, it’ll be okay.
I made an attempt to push the voice away, just for form’s sake. It knew it had me. It had already slipped past my defenses. It waited until I was sitting opposite my date and had seen just how good the wine was going to be.
Claudia. It’d be a shame to let half of a bottle like that go to waste. Have a little drink. You’ll stay on top of it this time.
And I did. For about a week. By the time you realize you’ve been pushed off the wagon it’s too late. You’re sitting on your ass choking on dust while life trundles off without you. The insidiousness of the disease makes you honestly believe that if you can stay sober for a few months then you are most definitely not an alcoholic and can therefore drink when you want to.
Sober for six months, drunk for a week, two weeks to recover. Sober for three months, drunk for five days, a week to recover. It’s a repetitive cycle, like that of Sisyphus, in the Greek myth, forever pushing that stupid rock up the hill only to have it roll down once it gets to the top.
When Starhyke ended I needed to find another job to earn a permanent work permit in the UK, so Andrew Dymond did me a favor and hired me as a receptionist and tea girl at his CG company.
“Hello, is that Lightworx Media? Can you advise me how to get more renderable data into my texture maps?”
“I have no bloody clue. I just serve the tea.”
Needless to say, I wasn’t well suited to the job, so I did us both a favor and quit. I sobered up, moved back to London, and rented a room in a friend’s flat. If I needed to work to stay in the UK, then it would be as an actress. My inner voice, the same one that had given me the confidence to move to L.A. when I was a kid, was back and giving the monster a run for her money.
Trusting in myself paid off again when I was introduced to a fantastic agent named Roxane Vacca by my friend Hilary Saltzman.
Roxane entered my life like a shining messenger of the gods, a letter in one hand stating she represented me and in the other a contract for a BBC series called Broken News. I’d booked a great job right out of the gate. I had enough documentation for my work visa, and I could stay in the UK. It felt just like when I landed Joan Green as an agent. Good representation is everything.
In the meantime, my stepfather had found a buyer for my home in L.A. and made me a million-dollar profit to boot, which made me feel much better about the loss of my house.
I was winning the battle for my new life. I was happy and confident. So why the fuck was I still stuck in a cycle of binging and detox? I started to see that I didn’t have an off button even when I was happy and my life seemed problem-free. When I was at a party I just wanted to keep on drinking and drinking. At dinners I wanted champagne, then wine, then a glass of port, and then another glass of port. I couldn’t have just one glass of wine, and I certainly never left half a bottle on the counter. I would see half-finished bottles of white wine in people’s fridges and wonder how the heck they did that. I’d find myself staring at people’s home bars, recalling the day when I’d stocked my own bar and never took a drop from it except to make other people’s drinks at parties.
I realized then that this was more than a matter of will or of emotional highs and lows. I always wanted a drink. I thought about drinking all the time. If I didn’t have a drink in my hand I’d be planning on how long it would be and what I’d have to do in order to be reunited with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer. I had a full-blown, full-time addiction. For the first time in five years I was able to see myself clearly; I was able to admit that I was an alcoholic.
Since I hit the UK I’d been jumping around like a grasshopper, moving more than fourteen times in four years to temporary homes in Bath, Winterbourne Down, the Ladbroke Grove and Westminster areas of London, and many other locations. I was done with moving, but I just couldn’t find the right place to hang my hat. The last time I’d been settled was in my home in L.A. where everything went to hell, so now I figured I’d make myself a hard target.
Then I had a series of accidents that forced me to slow down. I was walking around the streets of London, property guide in hand, looking for a place to buy with the proceeds from the sale of my L.A. home when I got hit by a guy on a Vespa. No major damage, just a sprained ankle, a chink in the armor so to speak. A few days later I made the mistake of going out in a pair of three-inch heels. The place I was living in had the steepest fucking stairs I’d ever seen in my life, and just as I was about to take the first step down, the injured ankle gave way, turning me around so that I fell backward down the entire flight of stairs, bumping the edge of every step as I went. It was like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, except instead of getting up and brushing myself off while everyone laughed, I found I couldn’t get up and that there was a baseball-sized lump bulging out from the back of my neck. I fished out my cell phone, only to discover that I didn’t know the UK emergency number. I’m dialing 911, and no one’s answering. Eventually one of my roommates found me and took me to the hospital. It turned out that it was a neck fracture. They put me in a neck brace, went over my X-rays, and then sent me on my way.
Alcoholics always overanalyze every minute detail of an incident in the hope of gleaning some insight that will help in the fight against the enemy. You’re like a military commander staring down at a map, studying the terrain.
So were the accidents just accidents, or were they my body’s way of slowing me down, of letting me know that I needed to stop moving and put down roots before things got really bad? Or was it the monster knocking me out of commission so that I’d be forced to sit still, grow impatient, and have a drink? My previous home had been a mixed blessing. I’d loved it, but it had also been a place of suffering and misery. Should I be looking for my own place? Would it make things better or worse?
You see how you can turn into a raving lunatic? You’re at war with yourself, you can’t trust yourself, you second-guess every thought and impulse. In short, life sucks.
I trusted my instincts and stumbled across the perfect place, a cute little flat in Notting Hill, and when I saw it I thought, “This is it. This is the place where I can make things right.”
I’d finished work on Broken News, and there was nothing else in the pipeline, but I knew just the trick to deal with the out-of-work blues—remodeling.
I was back in my element. I could redo the flat and make it look exactly how I wanted. I had some money left over to allow me to live comfortably and fund my pet project. I started building closets and tearing down walls.
And I had another project that kept me busy—devising systems of alcohol regulation to manage my problem. I lived next to a charming pub and I made a rule that this was the only pub I was permitted to drink in and that I’d only be allowed one drink per visit. I never kept wine in the house, so if I had a dinner party I would make the guests take the half-empty bottles home with them. The wagon might have been teetering along on broken wheels, dragging its load behind it, but at least it was going.
Those rules helped me, but they also created a whole new series of problems. Social drinking is so common in London that I found myself coming up with a litany of excuses to explain why I couldn’t go out drinking with friends at other pubs. I’d started by saying that I was driving but once people learned that I didn’t have a car I had to come up with something else.
“I’m on antibiotics. I’m pregnant. I’m allergic.”
I’d say anything to avoid being conspicuous, and in doing so made myself incredibly conspicuous. Keeping to my self-imposed rules was hard. Having a glass of wine with friends is one of my favorite things in the world. Wine loosens the lips and helps people relax and unwind. You laugh more, you confide secrets, hopes, and dreams. I missed that. Then I’d remind myself that the same stuff can turn you into a screaming bitch or a bona fide whacko, and I didn’t miss that at all.
I finished the apartment, and as if on cue more roles magically appeared. They were in crappy action films made in Eastern Europe. I was glad to have them, but I just couldn’t seem to land any more parts in the UK. There were about a dozen Americans and Canadians in London—like Gillian Anderson and Elizabeth McGovern—who’d lived there for years and seemed to book all the expat gigs.
Not allowing myself to drink also made it hard to make friends in England. I had no work or social life and the flat was finished. I tried working on my social life. People were more formal and reserved than in L.A., so I found it hard to strike up conversations with new people. God knows I tried. I would blabber on and smile like an idiot, but even in the grocery store or in elevators people would ignore me.
I began to feel invisible, a feeling accompanied by a mild paranoia. Was it London or was I going slightly mad from alcohol withdrawal? Self-discipline is all well and good when it comes to drinking, but at the same time life seemed to have lost some of its color. That feeling wasn’t helped by the long, wet London winter. I began having dreams about riding my motorcycle down Sunset Boulevard, the warm L.A. wind rushing over my face carrying the smell of orange blossoms and the beach. I wasn’t sure how much of my depression was me and how much was the weather, so I actually went and got light therapy at a place where they stick you in a little box and zap you with UVA rays.
I started going stir-crazy. I had to do something, so I jumped on a plane back to L.A. for the family Christmas party.
During my time in the UK I’d travel back to L.A. every year for pilot season.
I’d prepare well in advance, getting totally sober and as fit as I could manage. I’d pack my bags and head back to Hollywood with big expectations. I was going to book something. It was comeback time, baby!
I’d look great and feel great and sit in this Archstone apartment that I was paying $3,000 a month for and wait for the phone to ring. I didn’t get one audition, let alone an actual part. I had a shitty manager who promised me the moon and delivered nothing—not one meeting or audition.
One year I stayed in L.A. for four months. The apartment complex was filled with people who dreamed of working in Hollywood, wannabes and stage moms, their heads in the clouds, and at one point I realized that I was no different from them. I couldn’t book work, I was back at the beginning, all I had was a dream and an ever-deepening hole in my savings. As I sat by the phone I could feel myself becoming increasingly drawn to the bottle with each passing moment. It would only be a matter of time. I needed to keep moving.
So I started treating Los Angeles as I treated London. I’d do little day trips. I thought that if I took the pressure off waiting for the phone to ring, it might actually ring. Sometimes it works that way; this time it didn’t. Then I got a call from London. There was a meeting. A producer wanted me to come in and read for a part.
“I’m in L.A.”
“I need you here tomorrow.”
“I can’t. Christmas is coming. I’ve just rented a place. I just can’t.”
It seemed that I just couldn’t catch a break.
The year I went back for the family Christmas I was in for a pleasant surprise. It was in Aspen and it was snowing. Everyone made an effort to be nice, there were no fights, and I managed to stay sober. But I was bored, and my dreaded fortieth birthday was bearing down on me like a runaway car. I felt like I’d been possessed by Bridget Jones. I stared out the window at the falling snow. The last five years of my life had rushed by in a blur.
I was due to fly back to London, and I resolved to do something, anything to shake things up and reclaim a social life. I needed distraction, I needed friends, I needed a sex life. And so, like any modern girl who has trouble meeting people, I dove headfirst into the world of online dating.
London was a different place from when Dodi was alive. Back then it had been sensuous and classy. My new London was bleak and lonely, so I joined an exclusive dating service for the super rich and those of royal peerage.
To weed out gold diggers the membership fee was $25,000 U.S., but there was a loophole. If you were attractive, were sane, lived in an upmarket area, and had no criminal record you could join for much less, something close to $50. This ensured that rich old men who paid the full fee wouldn’t be stuck dating rich, ugly women. I sent in one of my Playboy shots, cropped to show me from the shoulders up, and within a few days found myself in the offices of the dating service undergoing a psychological test. They checked my passport to verify my age. I had to sign statutory declarations that I had no criminal convictions. I felt like I was interviewing for a position at Scotland Yard.
What the fuck am I doing here? Am I this desperate?
It was a bizarre experience, but still better than inviting my old dinner date, the monster, out for a good time. No, better to keep her locked safely away. I was so desperate to stay out of trouble with her that I didn’t mind stepping into a little trouble when it came to dating real people.
“Claudia, you’ve passed the initial screening. Now we’d like to conduct a home inspection.”
“Seriously? You just photocopied my passport. What more do you need?”
“We like to take every precaution. A member of the nobility has already expressed an interest in you.”
“After all this, it had better be bloody Prince Charming.”
The home inspection was carried out by a flamboyant Russian woman who bounced around my flat with the energy of a meth head.
“Ure antiques are so lubely. Your garten, it is so beautiful. We are soooo embarrassed to intrude but the gentleman is veddy particular.”
They pored over my things. I felt like a Mongolian mail-order bride being checked for fleas.
The prospective date called me the next day. He sounded terribly uptight, the kind of guy Basil Fawlty would have dreamed of welcoming in his hotel.
Fuck it, I’m already in for fifty bucks. I might as well get a free dinner and come out ahead.
He picked me up on time, which was good, but he had a Herman Munster head, the kind that looked like it had gotten caught in an elevator door. As we left my flat and walked toward his Bentley I warned him that he should be careful parking in my neighborhood, because the parking inspectors were brutal.
“Those fucking wogs. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
I was not amused. Nor was I amused when he berated the waitress or when he snapped his fingers at the sommelier. Even less amusing was the goodnight kiss, which was delivered with an octopus embrace and a straining erection poking against my leg. I gingerly extracted myself from his tentacles and hurried into the safety of my flat, slamming the door behind me. So much for Prince Charming.
You’d have had a much better night if you’d gone to the pub next door. It’s still open. Why not drop in for a quick one?
I told the monster to shut the fuck up.
The next day I got a polite inquiry from the dating service regarding my status: “Still single?”
I could sense the bewilderment of the Russian and her business partner. Why hadn’t I fucked the aristocratic pinhead, moved into his castle, and started spending his money?
My reply read: “Still single. The one guy you sent was a putz, and I haven’t met anyone else in the last twenty-four hours. Next time send a photo and bio first.”
And they did. None of them was young, spiritual, or sportif, yet they all claimed to be a combo platter of Lance Armstrong, Donald Trump, and the Dalai Lama. All in all I went on a half-dozen lame-ass dates. It seemed that having lost one Dodi Fayed, it wasn’t so easy to find another.
Then I made the mistake of agreeing to go away with a guy I’d never even met in person. We started emailing and then talked for hours on the phone. He had a northern accent, and I struggled to make out every other word, but he seemed funny and nice.
I was doing a play at the Edinburgh Festival and he offered to travel to Scotland, see my play, and take me to dinner. It sounded romantic, so I agreed to meet up. That night I made the colossal mistake of falling off the wagon and ended up in the sack with him and in the bathtub with him and on the floor with him and hanging over the balcony with him. I apparently did things to him that no woman had ever done before, and now he wanted to take me to Cyprus.
I don’t even know how it happened. When I woke up the next morning I had only a sketchy recollection of the night before—my memory was a blacked-out city—nothing. The monster was gathering power, and I was getting a little frightened. It was like something out of a fucking Stephen King novel, the kind where you have an evil-twin personality who takes you over and does stuff without your knowing. Scary shit.
I’d been seeing a talented actor in Edinburgh, a young fellow who performed improvised skits in ancient Sanskrit to drunken highbrow audiences. I liked him a lot but, hey, Cyprus beckoned, so I returned the call.
The good news was that Cyprus was lovely. The bad news was that I couldn’t recall a single detail of my lovefest with the northern guy, so I had no idea what he expected or even what he looked like naked. I had a feeling it involved something anal, otherwise the poor guy wouldn’t be so bloody excited. And one thing was certain: I wasn’t going to touch a single fucking drop of alcohol.
We’d both been dreadfully sick on the flight over. My body just quit after a month of work on the play, and he contracted food poisoning. But now that we were in the five-star luxury resort being massaged and eating fabulous food, things would improve. Right?
Now I’m the last one to judge people’s behavior whilst they’re imbibing. I’ve fallen asleep at my own dinner parties and slept with far too many strangers to be the one pointing the finger. But I’m usually a happy lush, never mean-spirited or cruel. This guy wasn’t a mean drunk, but he was a whining drunk. After he’d had a few he started complaining about everything. I laughed too loud, the service was dreadful, the pool was too cold, the room smelled. None of this was true; we were in a Cyprian paradise and I was a sober little church mouse on her best behavior. Really.
I figured that I must have been way toasted the night we had sex, because now the beer goggles were off and I could barely stand to look at him. I was struck with horror by his yellowed, crooked teeth, his calloused feet, and his fungus-infected toenails. I wanted to scream in frustration at his wardrobe of different-colored but otherwise identical golf shirts. I was back in hell, and I hadn’t even had a drink.
Luckily the diarrhea that went with his food poisoning kept on running like Niagara Falls. He hadn’t approached me sexually, but as in a B horror movie, you know it’s coming. It’s just a matter of time until the hand creeps over and goes for the grope.
When the moment came he couldn’t get an erection, and I thought the horror flick was over until he leaned in close to me and said, “Maybe if you did to me what you did in the bathtub that night we first met…”
He was talking about the night I’d blacked out. What the fuck had I done to him in the bathtub? It didn’t bear thinking about; I had to get out of there. I offered my condolences about his inability to perform and locked myself in the bathroom for a few hours on the pretext of secret women’s business. When I came out he’d gone to the bar and I made a hasty retreat to the next village, where I booked into a shithole hotel, then flew back to London the next morning.
“Nothing’s free, baby,” a voice in my head kept on repeating.
Was that the monster or the voice of wisdom? I figured they might as well be one and the same since the fucking voice of wisdom, when it can be bothered raising its head, always does so after you’ve jumped headfirst into the shit heap.
By the time my fortieth birthday came around I’d been dry for almost six months. I was sober as a judge and just about as boring.
Long ago I’d set forty as the goal by which I’d be free of my problem and have my career back in full bloom. My career had wilted and dried up, but at least my disease seemed to have followed suit. I’d been seeing a new guy, and he encouraged me to come celebrate my birthday with him in Ibiza, the Spanish island where Brits go to let loose and party. I went to sunny Spain, stayed stone-cold sober, and had the worst vacation of my life. The travel agent booked us into a hotel on the wrong side of the city. We were supposed to be staying in the sexy party zone; instead I found myself sharing the beach with fat German businessmen and obnoxious Brits who wore black socks and were orbited by screaming, sunburnt kids. I was unemployed, sober, living in a foreign country, and my birthday sucked. Life didn’t begin at forty, it damn well ended.
I went back to my flat in London totally miserable only to discover that the annual Notting Hill carnival was taking place right outside my front door.
Claudia, this is your chance to have a real party. You made it to middle age, you survived. You deserve to celebrate. Go and have a good time.
The monster had picked its moment well, because, right then, those words rang with authority. They made such perfect fucking sense!
So I listened. No falling off the wagon this time; I threw myself off the fucking thing, right into a tasty pint of lager at my local.
That’s one of the things I fucking hate about the monster. I’d lasted it out. I’d buckled up and ridden the fucking bull for half a year, and then one slip and I was back to square one. It’s beyond frustrating; it’s a disease that swallows hope.
When I was finally done with my birthday binge, I looked up the address of the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous and headed on down. I was desperate; I was a mess. The room was filled with cigarette smoke; I sat in the back row and kept quiet.
That wasn’t my first time at an AA meeting. During one of my visits back to L.A. I’d gone to the Beverly Hills meetings because I heard there were cute guys there. And one of them came right up to me and said, “We don’t shake hands here at AA. We hug.”
Something about that sent a shiver up my spine. It was as if they were there as a comfort group, to sugarcoat something that was deadly serious to me. A hug wasn’t going to fix the monster. You can’t wrap a viper in a knit-wool sweater, give it a hug, and expect it not to bite you. The monster doesn’t fuck around; the monster is playing for keeps.
And I’d been to one other meeting with my brother in Lake Arrowhead. That was mainly a bunch of old-timers talking about the shittiest things they’d done to their loved ones when they were drunk.
I hated the idea of AA. I hated getting up there and making my confession to a room full of strangers. The very idea was demoralizing, but this time I was desperate and I was in London, so maybe it really would be anonymous. I’d stick with it this time. I’d reverse my childhood divorce from God and really surrender to Him.
When it was my turn I got up there and said, “Hi. My name is Claudia, and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for one day.”
After I’d spilled my guts, we had a break and everyone rushed out to smoke some more. I was alone again and there was no relief. I’d hated saying it, it depressed me to say it. I thought, wouldn’t it have been great to get up there and say, “Hi, I’m Claudia, and I used to be an alcoholic”?
I returned to my seat and, as I listened to them talk about God, I couldn’t help but think that if there was a God, he would want us cured, not eternally suffering. The people I saw get up and talk on the podium were all in pain, all still desperate. I saw myself in them and it occurred to me that this wasn’t a cure, this was disease management. I knew management; I’d been struggling with my disease for years, wrestling with the monster, and this was a support group to help continue the struggle. This was a way to kill some time so you don’t drink.
I left the meeting. There was nothing uplifting or joyful, and the smoking rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed to me that they were just replacing one bad habit with another.
A week later I was back at AA, this time at the Portobello Road center. I reasoned that I had to overcome my own disinclination to be there. What if the answer to my problems lay on the other side of my inherited Germanic pride? I’d do it for real. I’d get up there at the meeting and do my thing, and afterward I’d go and work all of the twelve steps. And I did. I even did the one where you’re supposed to make amends to everyone you’ve ever hurt in your life. I tried it for half a year, but it didn’t change the disease. It didn’t change my genetic disposition toward alcohol. Some of the reports I read said that AA doesn’t work for the gross majority of the people who try it. The numbers are difficult to track because of their policy of anonymity, but I read one report that said less than 5 percent of people who rely on AA to stay sober do so after the first year. The relapse rate for people in AA is huge.5
I came to the conclusion that if some people benefit from it then great, good for them, but this was not the way for me. I was tired of fighting, I didn’t need support or love or strangers sharing their pain with me. I didn’t need hugs and handshakes from withered-up smokers or sugar junkies with fat bellies. I needed a cure; I needed my life back.
I went home and started buying books. I read just about every book I could find on addicts and their struggles. I pored over the pages of other people’s stories trying to find a common link.
There were common stories of trauma, of death and divorce and rejection, but there was something that none of the material seemed to cover—the change that had taken place in my body and brain. I’d changed. Everyone who told their stories in those books had. We all went from partying to becoming unwitting addicts. Why can some people drink heavily but not become full-blown alcoholics? Why was it so easy for me to give up cocaine? I’d never liked blow, never craved it. But wine, wine was a friend. I liked wine and I loved champagne, and now I’d changed. We had a symbiotic relationship; I couldn’t live without them.
I gave up on AA but not on God. I’m not an atheist. I’ve always had a strong spiritual life; it’s one of the things that’s kept me hanging in there. I’ve always felt that God was watching out for me, and when I maintained my prayers I felt strong enough to go head to head with the monster. At the same time though, I discovered that God cannot cure this disease just as He cannot cure cancer or make you grow back a limb.
So I kept on praying, but if God was saying anything back, then I couldn’t hear him. I figured it was just like the telephone that wouldn’t ring; I just had to hang in there and have faith. Just hang in there a little longer.
After five years in the UK I sat down and re-evaluated my life. It was crunch time. I wasn’t booking anything in London, I wasn’t booking anything in L.A., but I was hemorrhaging money in both towns. I’d moved to the UK hoping for a fresh start but instead felt like a tightrope walker again, swaying back and forth on a thin line between two lives with the abyss always there below me. If nothing else, my time away from the United States had taught me where my true home was and that I could never really leave it. My fascination with history, with the old world, would always be a part of me, but I was bound up with Hollywood body and soul. I missed the sun, the people, and the wheels of the entertainment industry moving around me, even if I was not an active part of it.
And do you know what the ultimate deciding factor was? I came to the realization that if I couldn’t shake the monster in time, if it broke me and I ended up just like my friend Jeff Conaway, then I had to decide where I wanted to die. That was my final moment of clarity that got me on the plane back to L.A.
I rented out my London flat to a nice American couple and headed home. I was done with optimism. There was no spring in my step. The monster was riding me hard, weighing me down. I didn’t know what I had to do to get things back on track. Nothing in my life was stable. I was flailing around, searching for the right combination of choices that would allow me to get my life back. The memory of the old Claudia was strong. The good times were still vivid in my mind’s eye, but the means to recover them were elusive. I was like Tantalus in the underworld, the fruit he eternally hungered for hanging just beyond his reach.
From my diary, November 1, 2008:
It’s 8 a.m., and I’m clearing the dishes from last night’s dinner party. My boyfriend David is in the shower. One of my friends brought a few bottles of what appeared to be very good red wine. I didn’t read the label or smell the wine, because I’ve only been sober for three months this time around, and I didn’t want to think about what I was missing out on. But now there’s half a glass staring at me. A sniff can’t hurt. I lift the glass; it smells heavenly. The rich, deep red is still fragrant with tannins and earthiness. It smells like autumn, like Italy, like lamb shanks, like making love in front of a crackling fire. It smells like the good times, the happy times when I was alive, when I wasn’t an alcoholic.
If I drink this half glass of wine will it awaken the monster? Will I suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to binge? Will the last six months’ worth of therapy prove to be a waste of time?
If I drink this wine, I won’t be able to kiss David all day because he’ll smell it on me and probably never speak to me again. We have plans to go to the beach and walk around Third Street Promenade, maybe buy that new mouse for him at the Apple Store, and get some fresh fish at Santa Monica Seafood. These plans will be ruined.
I know that if I drink this wine I will be toying with the monster. I’ll be presuming that I am powerful when I am not. I am weak. I am a drunk just like the guy I saw passed out on the sidewalk in front of Starbucks. I am no better or worse.
I miss red wine. It’s like not being able to dance with your favorite partner. I sound like a battered housewife who keeps making excuses for her husband. I love the wine, despite the fact that it’s trying to kill me.
I pour the leftover wine down the sink. It’s All Saints’ Day. The veil between our world and the spirit world is still thin, so maybe Patrick’s watching over me today. But tomorrow it’ll just be me, myself, and I. Will I ever feel normal again?
My diary was filled with entries like that one. I wrote hundreds of sorrow-filled pages about my struggle. Tear stains marked pages where I’d fallen off the wagon, coffee stains marked pages where I’d been sober for thirty or sixty or ninety days. There were copious musings about how much better my life would be if I were sober forever, and there were diatribes about how shitty it was that I couldn’t even have a glass of wine at a dinner party. There are letters written to my parents apologizing for my behavior and thanking them for their support. There are entries complaining bitterly about inheriting their fucked-up, alcoholic genes. My diary is filled with self-absorbed post-binge musings, manic scrawls, even suicidal rants. I have thick diaries and I like to write—a lot. It’s one of the ways in which I try to make sense of things.
When I came back from the UK I was miserable, still stuck in my sober-binge cycle, so I decided to stop waiting for the phone to ring and start living. I took classes in languages, art, and writing. I started hiking every day.
In the summer of 2008 I met a new man, master photographer and lighting guru David Honl. David was a departure from the kind of guy I normally dated. He was my own age, for a start, and he had a depressive streak, but also a very dry sense of humor that I enjoyed. And man, could he make me look good in a photo! He was very encouraging when he’d photograph me, very complimentary, just the thing I needed at that time in my life. He’d lived in Turkey for years, had spent time in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars. I liked him—a lot—and I was determined that even if everything else in my life was fucked up, my relationship with David wouldn’t be, at least not as much as the last string of guys I’d dated.
The smartest way to do that was to try to stay sober most of the time and hide my disease from him. He couldn’t be allowed to see the monster. Our relationship was just budding, and the monster was emotional napalm, enough to wipe out a forest.
When I was recovering from a binge I’d pretend that I had a cold or some other illness. The swine flu epidemic bought me a whole week. He appeared on my doorstep unannounced one day, his brother standing beside him, and asked me to come out to lunch. I kept running into the bathroom to throw up, and I looked like shit. I thought I’d die of embarrassment. I’ll never forget the disappointed look he gave me as he left. Non-addicts take offense at all sorts of small inconveniences and slights, because they don’t share the same perspective; they don’t realize that you’re fighting for your life.
I started meditating and read a book a day, even though it killed my eyes. It took my mind off of drinking and guilt and helped pass the time until I was once more socially acceptable.
David liked an occasional drink and was very supportive of my sobriety, but he got confused when I’d suddenly fall off the wagon and overdo it. He could see that something was wrong with me, but his vision was clouded; he was in love, and he just couldn’t connect the dots because he’d never known an addict. But I couldn’t hide the monster away forever. I knew she’d eventually emerge from her cave and then David would turn and run and never come back.
I was so scared of telling David the truth that I started running around like a headless chicken, trying anything and everything to make me well—anything except drugs. I’d seen where that had taken Jeff Conaway and other friends of mine. What started out as medication to manage one problem could quickly turn into a whole other addiction. What if I failed to beat the booze with drugs and then found myself hooked on both?
I made up a to-do list that included every kind of nonmedical solution I could think of and got to work on it:
1. GO TO DOCTOR AND GET LIVER TESTS.
“Claudia, your liver is ruined! How could you do this to yourself? Don’t touch another drop. One more mouthful and your liver will explode, leaving you to die the most horrible of deaths.”
That’s what I’d been hoping to hear, but the tests showed that my liver was completely healthy.
I amused myself with the theory that I was part cockroach, built to withstand even a nuclear disaster. My other leading theory was that the alcohol had pickled my liver, preserving it in perfect condition.
2. BECOME A VEGETARIAN.
I tried, and when that didn’t help, I even went macrobiotic and completely cut out sugar. Maybe those hippie therapists at the rehab resort were right. Maybe sugar lured the monster out of its cave. No such luck. It was nuts. I was poring over my past again like a detective, digging up old cases, revisiting past conclusions in case I’d missed one vital clue that would make sense of everything.
3. GO TO CHURCH AND PRAY—HARD!
I’d decided to get back together with God when I was in England but he didn’t seem to be returning my calls. That was understandable. I’d called things off a long time ago, and now here I was suddenly wanting to patch things up. I needed to go to church and make an official effort; then maybe he would take five minutes to come down off the cloud and sort my life out.
I had a very bad Easter in 2008, and I’d heard about a healing ceremony in this Catholic church in the valley. The priest was famous for bestowing blessings on the sick, and there had even been some reported miracles.
When I arrived there were lots of people on crutches and in wheelchairs. My goddaughter came with me and we sat through Mass. Part of the service was in Spanish, part in English.
When it was my turn to stand before the priest he asked me, “Do you need to be healed from something?”
And I just burst into tears.
“Yes. I do. I’m sick.”
So he put oil on my forehead and on my chest, and all the while I was weeping, praying for a miracle.
And I did feel something go through my body. I felt some sort of healing, and after that any time I felt like a drink I’d throw myself on my knees and pray for help. I’d pray for strength, pray to get through the day, pray not to have cravings, pray not to think about it. And when the craving passed, I’d give thanks for one more day of sobriety.
It was two months before I fell off the wagon again, and man, did I feel guilty. I haven’t felt guilt when I cheated on people or when I stole things as a kid. I always justified everything, but now I felt that I was cheating on God. At the same time, I was reminded just how powerless I was against my disease. If God couldn’t help me battle the monster, then what hope was there? Then I got angry at God. Why had He done this to me? Why did He piss in my gene pool? How come my brother Vince got off scot-free?
I put a line through number 3. That was okay, I still had two more options on the list.
4. TRY ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE.
I went to Siddha Yoga retreats, got acupuncture for addiction, went to a fasting clinic, and even tried a meditation “doctor” who claimed to have cured members of the Grateful Dead.
All failures. I was down to my last shot.
5. GET HYPNOTIZED.
I found an ad on the Internet while searching for “the best hypnotist in L.A.” I called the number to make an appointment.
“Claudia, I’ve worked miracles with every kind of addict. I can help you. Come on over ASAP!”
The hypnotist’s apartment building was crumbling and looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the ’70s, but it was the fucking Taj Mahal compared to his apartment, which stank of old cigarettes, cat urine, and boiled cabbage.
“Watch the medal as it swings. See how it catches the light?”
He tried to hypnotize me into a state of past-life regression so that I could try to pinpoint when my alcoholism began. Now, I’m a big history buff, so if you want to charge me $450 to send me back to Renaissance Florence where I get to have some life-changing experience or at the very least a romping good time, then great. But this guy had a clumsy manner, the tape recorder kept jamming, and the chair I was sitting in had broken springs.
I told him I wasn’t impressed. He told me that I was a difficult case and needed a series of treatments at $120 a pop.
Fuck. That was it, then. It was all a load of very expensive horseshit, and I was at my wits’ end. I’d tried everything. Except the hard-core stuff. The stuff with the list of side effects as long as my arm. And I wasn’t ready for that, not yet.
I thought it would be a good idea for David and me to move in together. It would make it harder for me to binge, and he would be a healthy distraction. A relationship was one way of keeping busy. Surprise, surprise! It turned out to be a very bad idea. By then my compulsion was far beyond my control. I’d have to fabricate arguments, sneak out for binges, come up with all sorts of schemes to get what I could not do without.
And, of course, David finally realized I had a problem. And by then it wasn’t so much a problem as it was my entire life. Being an alcoholic was now normal. The problem was the lengths to which I’d have to go to appear normal by the standards of the outside world.
I was scared to commit to David, and he was coming on strong, talking about marriage and the future. I felt hopeless, that there was no future for me, that my struggle with the monster was a full-time career and relationship bundled into one. And David sensed this. He was jealous of the monster, of the hold she had over me.
So, since we were fighting at home, and I was in the middle of a binge, and I couldn’t stand the sight of David and wanted to break up, we went on a trip to Tahiti.
Now you might be thinking, “Why the fuck would she do something so monumentally stupid?” Because my therapist told me to.
“You should go to Tahiti. It would be good for you to work on your relationship in a neutral environment.”
From the moment we stepped on the plane the trip was a disaster. While David slept I sneaked to the back of the plane to buy little bottles of vodka from the flight attendant. My friends told me that Tahiti was heaven on earth. All I remember is rushing about like a crazy woman, drinking anything I could get my hands on. Rum, beer, vodka, gin. I launched an assault on the minibar and gutted it of tiny bottles in under twenty minutes. I’d buy bottles of liquor from the hotel shop and go through the whole charade of having them gift wrapped, only to tear them open in my room and guzzle their contents while I cried uncontrollably. I was a fucking mess. I’d have drunk mouthwash if I’d had any on hand. Tahiti wasn’t heaven for me. It was definitely hell on earth.
At one point I changed hotel rooms to get away from David, and then I sneaked back into his room when he was out and drank his entire minibar.
I’m sure David must have had a moment when he went to get a sip of vodka and realized that I’d cleaned him out and filled up all the bottles with water to cover my tracks.
I lasted half a week and then fled. I have no idea how I managed to travel from the island of Mo‘orea, where we’d been staying, to Papeete on nearby Tahiti, then get onto a bus and then an airplane, but somehow I made it. They say a drunk can always find his way home. Well, I found my way home from 4,000 miles away in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
I put my suitcase on my bed and opened it. It was filled with sand and ripped clothing and empty little bottles. Then I realized that I’d left my iPhone on with the data roaming the whole time I was in the South Pacific.
Altered flight charges: $5,000. Cell phone stupidity: $2,000. Memories of Tahiti: priceless.
Before David could get home I went to my mom’s place in Napa and went through the worst detox in my life. I was dehydrated and shitting blood and my eyelids were so swollen that I tried using Preparation H on them to reduce the swelling. I’d pass out, then wake up a few hours later and search the house for booze. My poor mom ended up taking me to the hospital. It took me nearly ten days to recover.
Needless to say, the Tahiti trip put some strain on my relationship. David now knew that I was a crazy wino and told me that if he smelled alcohol on my breath again he’d leave me. I was grateful for the second chance and swore I’d go dry. I’d lost twenty-five pounds during the detox, and I looked great, which lent weight to my promise of sobriety.
I was sober for three months before I slipped. I started out on small binges with minor detox flare-ups that I thought I could keep hidden. Those flare-ups quickly spread into a raging fire that consumed me, burning me from the inside out.
The binges ran day and night and didn’t stop until I passed out. When I woke up I’d shake and vomit until I was empty and then lie on the bathroom floor, half-conscious, hallucinating all kinds of scary shit.
When I could walk I’d start on chamomile tea and water, then move on to milk thistle and warm milk, anything to calm the thoughts of guilt and self-hate and suicide and help get my body into a state where it could sleep and heal.
Sleep deprivation was a big issue. I raided health food stores for natural sleeping aids because over-the-counter pills made the detoxes even worse. They made the hallucinations more intense and wired me up instead of calming me down. At night I’d take a hot bath and lie down and sweat out the toxins, terrified of what was to come. First the shakes would start, then the hot and cold flashes, and then more shaking. The room would fill with crazy thunder crashes, and I’d hear the voices of the ghosts and ghouls who visited me in my nightmares. Then I’d get hungry, but the nausea would overtake me so that I couldn’t eat, not even a cracker. I’d go to the kitchen and force down a banana or some milk and pray I wouldn’t puke it up. I knew my body needed sustenance when I’d been living on nothing but beer for five days. I’d go back to bed and just lie there, my mind amped up, filled with horrible thoughts that denied me the sleep I so badly wanted. I’d convinced myself that the monster was in the room, that if I fell asleep she would smother me. The CIA tortures people with sleep deprivation, and here I was doing it to myself.
After a sleepless night I’d get up and hide from the California sunshine like a hungover vampire. This was the same light that I had missed so much in London, the sun that I’d longed for. Now it hurt my yellow eyes and revealed too much of my puffy face. It stole away the shadows and left no doubt in my mind that I was losing. I was turning into the very monster I’d been fighting against.
I decided I had to get out of the house. I told David I was going for a walk. My reflexes were so bad, I knew I couldn’t get out of the way of a car if I had to. My eyesight was shot from dehydration. I was afraid to leave the house, but I had no choice. I couldn’t drink at home, because I was terrified of David catching me and leaving.
That was how I ended up sitting in a khaki-colored bus stop on Coldwater Canyon Avenue watching the world pass me by.
I felt dirty, ugly, and utterly alone. I had thought I’d reached the lowest point in my life when I clung to the toilet bowl at my mom’s house, my secret finally revealed. But I was wrong. Sitting at the bus stop drinking a hastily mixed screwdriver—this was rock bottom. You know when you have those dreams in which you realize you’re naked and start scrambling around for clothes? I was so far gone I couldn’t make the slightest effort to cover up my addiction. I was on display for the whole world as it passed by.
I was a slave to the monster. She was running the show now. I was strapped into the back seat, right between my mom and Holly on the drive to rehab. I’d been there the whole time. I wasn’t driving that car; the monster was behind the wheel. It had let me enjoy my delusions while it gathered more power, preparing for the final siege. I’d lost. Sitting there in that bus shelter, I declared defeat.
Game over. I give up. I’ve got nothing left to fight back with.
When I was a teenager I won a drama scholarship to the Laguna Playhouse that I never used. They had awarded it to me for playing the Marilyn Monroe character in a scene from Bus Stop.
In the movie Marilyn’s character tries to travel to Hollywood, where she hopes she’ll be discovered. Instead, she gets kidnapped by a cowboy who becomes obsessed with her after she sings “That Old Black Magic” at a rodeo.
I really had escaped to Hollywood and been discovered, but my kidnapper had still managed a successful abduction. The song came to me as I sat there, at my own bus stop, my monster mocking me. That old black magic had me in its spell, and it was a spell that I couldn’t break on my own. I needed help to do that, and I knew that if I didn’t get it right away I’d keep marching on to the monster’s tune until it finally killed me.
Somehow I made it home, locked myself in my room, and called Holly. It took me five attempts to navigate the directory on my iPhone and reach her—hand-eye coordination was a distant memory.
“Holly, I can’t let David see me like this. Can you take me to a detox center?”
I was shaking so badly that I thought my teeth were going to crack into little pieces.
Holly arrived calm and in control, my guardian angel. She joked with me as she helped me get dressed; I couldn’t even put my pants on. She then started calling detox centers, trying to find a place that would take SAG insurance while I lay on the bed and prayed that my heart, which was beating as hard as if I’d just run a marathon, wouldn’t suddenly stop.
She found a place in Tarzana, bundled me into the car, and drove me down the highway, straight to hell.
The lady checking me in was on a go-slow—I guess she’d just had a big lunch. I stood there going through a horrible detox, Holly helping me stand upright, while she yammered on and on about policies and procedures and gave me form after form to sign.
“What if I have a seizure? That’s why I’m here. I’m terrified I’m going to have a seizure. Can you give me something?”
“No. We have to complete your paperwork.”
My eyesight was fading and I was worried I was signing my life away. Was I giving them legal power to hold me? Or relieving them of liability if they killed me out of incompetence?
They’re out to get you, especially this bitch. Get out of here. Go and stay with Holly or Trish until you’re better. You’ll be okay.
That fucking monster sure picks her moments.
That voice in my head became a new kind of inner compass. I decided that when it told me to do something I would do the opposite. It wanted me to go, so I would stay and detox and work out the next step when I was in a rational state of mind.
The monster was displeased with my attempted rebellion and sent me a sign to remind me who was in charge. I fell to my knees and nearly choked on the amount of vomit I produced.
They took me into a holding area, and Holly had to leave. I sat in a plastic chair for over an hour waiting for someone to come and search my bags. There was only one other person in the room, a large man who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in adding to my misery.
I got up to get a sweater out of my bag, which was in the next room. He stepped in front of me and told me in a scary, whispered tone that I had better sit back down.
“We have rules here. You can’t get things from your bags while they’re being searched.”
When you’re going through a detox, your temperature goes from hot to cold and back again. One minute you might as well be standing on top of Mount Everest, the next in the earth’s molten core.
“I’m freezing. I’ve got to have my sweater. You can get it for me if you like.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t break the rules for you. People like you make life difficult for everyone here. We have rules here. You have to follow them.”
It was insane. Even in my fucked-up state I could see that this guy was messing with me.
He kept me there for thirty minutes while I shook so hard that I nearly bit through my tongue. Next, a lady came for me and led me to a depressing shared bedroom. She was covered with tattoos and had crazy purple hair, a refugee from the Jim Rose Circus. She was clearly an ex-junkie, her teeth rotted through from crystal meth. She took my cell phone away and left me alone.
That was it. No therapy, no one talking to me, no doctor visiting me, nothing.
I noticed that there was a woman curled into a ball on the single bed across from mine. I sat and watched her for a long time, wondering if she was dead or alive. She finally sat up, a tiny, dark-haired woman who spoke in a language I didn’t recognize. She kept rifling through a rumpled plastic bag on her bed with some old withered fruit in it, choosing one and holding it out to me. I’d politely refuse, and she’d nod sagely and go back to the bag, searching for a more suitable offering.
I finally took an apple just to stop the lunacy. I felt like I was trapped in a David Lynch movie.
I was still shaking, so I found a nurse and tried to explain to her what the person who admitted me didn’t care to hear—that I was scared of having a seizure, that I wasn’t a pill popper but did need medical help.
“Med time is four o’clock. Come back in an hour.”
“What if I’m dead in an hour?”
She shrugged and looked at me as if I were a stupid child.
“Med time is four o’clock.”
I went back and lay on my bed and waited, resting my head on my little suitcase for fear someone would steal it. I heard the fruit lady rustling around in her bag again.
I lasted thirty-six hours before I checked myself out. Suddenly the staff who had been so unhelpful couldn’t have been more fucking charming. The center was getting two grand a night for keeping me there, and they wanted to milk at least another two nights out of my stay. Well, fuck them.
The pills they’d given me had helped, though. I even managed to sleep for a whole hour. Holly picked me up and was amazed that I looked like my old self again. Somewhere in the ether a team of overworked angels was keeping me alive.
Lying on the bed in the detox center I’d had a moment of clarity, one thought that helped me pull myself together: I felt a blinding hatred for my disease. There was no more on-again, off-again with the monster. I fucking hated her. I felt the way I did when I was a teenager in that rapist’s van, 110 pounds and unable to fight the bastard off.
I’d taken something else from the detox center—a colorful little flyer for Vivitrol.
“One month of Vivitrol—FREE! Vivitrol—the shot that’ll help you stay sober.”
I called the number on that flyer a dozen times and left messages with various people and answering machines trying to make an appointment to get the shot. No one ever called me back. I left my cell phone number, home phone number, and email address. I’d finally decided to try medication, and now the fuckers wouldn’t give me any.
The shot was $1,000 a month, and although my savings were running out I was willing to pay anything if it would help. The shot was supposed to inhibit cravings. I wanted that shot, and getting that shot suddenly became very important to me. I started researching Vivitrol and found it was an opiate blocker. It blocked all good feelings—everything from sexual feelings to enjoyment of food; emotions, including love; work-out highs; everything. Suddenly I was relieved that no one had returned my calls.
I kept on searching for a medical answer and in the spring of 2008 decided to go on Antabuse. My SAG insurance wouldn’t cover it, but I figured it was worth the $350 if it worked. I did my research first and found myself in the same predicament as with Vivitrol. You think the list of side effects you hear rattled off on TV commercials for prostate drugs is bad? Here’s the small print on Antabuse:
Seek medical attention right away if any of these SEVERE side effects occur when using Antabuse:
Severe allergic reactions (rash; hives; difficulty breathing; tightness in the chest; swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue); blurred vision; changes in color vision; dark urine; loss of appetite; mental or mood problems; nausea; numbness or tingling of the arms or legs; seizures; tiredness; vomiting; weakness; yellowing of the eyes or skin.
I mean, seriously, who’d put that in their body? Alcohol seemed like a milder poison than that. Good Lord, addicts are a confused lot! And a poor lot. Being an addict ain’t cheap: $200 an hour for therapy, $350 for Antabuse prescriptions, $3,500 for detox, $30,000-plus for rehab.
I was half mad with frustration and physically, emotionally, and financially drained.
But those angels must have been watching out for me, because while researching Antabuse, I stumbled on an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about something called The Sinclair Method. I didn’t know it then but that article would change my life.
That detox from hell, with all its horrific side effects, would be my last. The monster didn’t know it yet, but she was beaten.
In the time leading up to my discovery of The Sinclair Method, I could sense that change was in the wind. For starters, after three years of silence, the phone rang and I booked a job on the TV show Nip/Tuck.
But would the coming change be for better or worse? Life is seldom cut and dried. Something that starts out well can turn bad and vice versa.
After my stint in the detox center I’d moved out of the place I was sharing with David. I needed space to save our relationship, space to see whether the wind would turn for or against me. I had an acting job, and that, as always, was my life raft. I clung to it, focusing on getting healthy and staying sober.
I was living with my friend Trish and running laps around Lake Hollywood, working out as hard and as often as my body could take it; I had to appear naked on TV. The anxiety I felt as a teenager about seeing my butt on a fifty-foot-high screen was nothing compared to that of being a detoxing fortysomething who was going to bare her all on a popular TV series.
What I failed to keep in mind was that a fortysomething body can’t be molded as easily as that of a young woman injecting horse piss on a 500-calorie-a-day diet or even a woman in her thirties doing hundreds of lunges in preparation for Playboy. I pounded the pavement so hard it threw my back out. My pelvis and lower back felt like they were swimming beneath my skin, and each time they moved (which was any time I did anything apart from lie on my back) I felt a debilitating pain.
Luckily, that happened toward the end of my training regime, so I looked great, but it meant that I was in extreme pain all the way through the shoot. That would have been fine if we were shooting a period drama and all I had to do was sit in a high-backed chair and look statuesque, but for this particular episode the scriptwriters had come up with some particularly weird shit.
I was cast as a woman who pays Julian McMahon’s character to satisfy a bizarre sexual fetish. First, he would throw me into a tub filled with ice and keep me there until my heart stopped from hypothermia, then he would carry my numb body to the bed, throw me on it, and fuck me back to life, the heat from his body kick-starting my heart back into action.
I mean, how fucking weird is that? But it didn’t stop me from taking the role. My career was as frozen as my body when the stunt man ripped me out of the bath and threw me on the bed. Maybe this job, so long in coming, would drive the life back into it.
When Nip/Tuck wrapped I drove straight to Trish’s house and raided her cupboards. The pain, combined with the stress of creating what I hoped would be my comeback performance, had knocked down the last of my defenses. I found a bottle of vodka and drank practically the whole thing in one sitting.
The Sinclair Method has successfully helped moderate alcohol drinking in Finland, where excessive alcohol use is a major national problem, as well as other countries including Israel, Russia, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Venezuela and Estonia. A statistical analysis of the data obtained from clinics in Finland shows highly significant reductions in alcohol drinking. The method is successful with more than 78% of alcoholics. In Florida the success rates since 2002 have been more than 85%. During the treatment program when shown on a graph a pattern emerges. It was always a classical extinction curve: drinking and craving became progressively lower with each week of treatment.
That was from a scientific article I read called “Clinical Evidence from The Sinclair Method Clinic in Sarasota, Florida.” The Florida clinic was the only one in the United States offering the Sinclair Method. The clinic’s website said:
Internationally hundreds of thousands of people have been helped using the Sinclair Method.
More than 80% of all the clients in the program were successful in long term control of their alcohol consumption, some to acceptable levels (“Social Drinking”) and others to complete abstinence. For those who desired to control their alcohol consumption, their drinking was reduced to an average of 1 drink per day. These same individuals had at one point consumed anywhere from 24 to 50 drinks or more a week. Some of The Sinclair Method’s successful patients had consumed more than 200 ounces of alcohol a week prior to the program.6
An 80% success rate! Apart from the grim reaper, who has the only 100% guaranteed cure for addiction, I’d never heard of a treatment with such a high rate of success. What’s more, the article made an astonishing claim—that The Sinclair Method was a genuine cure for alcoholism.
The word “cure” is a powerful one and can’t be used lightly. The Sinclair Method makes use of a drug called naltrexone, which creates a state of pharmacological extinction in the addict’s brain. It doesn’t block the effect of alcohol; rather, it gradually resets the brain back to the pre-addiction condition, making it a bona fide cure.
But there was one catch: the cure only remained a cure as long as you took the pill, every time before you had a drink, for the rest of your life. Otherwise the endorphins released when drinking would not be blocked by the effect of naltrexone and would lead the brain to revert to a state of craving alcohol.
I researched naltrexone and found that it had been available and FDA-approved for the treatment of alcoholism since 1994. It was nonaddictive, and the side effects were minor and temporary—nausea, headaches, and insomnia. Sign me up!
The Florida clinic charged $3,800 for treatment, beyond my budget by that stage. Luckily, I found a book, The Cure for Alcoholism by Roy Eskapa, PhD.
The book had an introduction by David Sinclair, PhD, who developed The Sinclair Method, which described alcoholism as a learned chemical addiction of the brain. Sinclair maintains that abstinence only makes the problem worse, and I’d made the biggest mistake in the book: I’d gone stone-cold sober after every binge. The sudden deprivation of alcohol only led to stronger cravings. This not only leads to eventual relapse but also damages the brain and internal organs. What no one at rehab or detox centers ever tells you is that you can detox by gradually reducing your alcohol intake. The reason no one thinks to mention this is that most alcoholics aren’t capable of doing it. But with naltrexone it’s made possible by one amazing, almost unbelievable fact—that The Sinclair Method only works as a cure if the alcoholic keeps on drinking.
You take naltrexone to reduce your consumption, and at the same time it kills off your addiction. My armor was battered and hanging on by its fraying straps, but now I’d have something to fight the monster with that I’d never had before—a weapon. I’d always been on the defensive, on the back foot while the monster attacked at will. If the claims about The Sinclair Method were true I just might be able to obliterate that bitch once and for all.
The Cure for Alcoholism contained all the information I needed to start The Sinclair Method solo. The first step was to find a doctor who would prescribe naltrexone, which costs about $30 for thirty 50 mg pills—about a dollar added to the cost of a night out. Even better, I was able to use my SAG insurance, which brought the cost down even more to $10 for thirty pills.
By taking one pill one hour before drinking I could begin the process of pharmacological extinction.
I was still not turned on by the idea of taking a pill forever, but hell, if it worked it was better than going to an AA meeting and fighting the war every fucking day for the rest of my life. And the other thing that resonated with me was The Sinclair Method’s treatment of alcoholism as a disease, like diabetes or high blood pressure. It was a relief to know that someone had devised a safe, medically proven, nonaddictive way to combat it.
Following on from the use of naltrexone, the book encouraged using the beneficial effect of the drug to strengthen healthy, alternative behaviors—eating tasty meals, exercise, sports, even sex.
I went in to see my doctor, armed with a copy of The Cure for Alcoholism. I’d been fighting every day for the last ten years. I wanted peace, I wanted my life back, and I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
The doctor was a nice young guy who a pill-popping friend had recommended, one used to dealing with addicts. I’d seen him once before when I was suffering a combo attack of flu and alcohol withdrawal. He’d prescribed some anti-anxiety pills to deal with the monster and an antibiotic for the flu. The flu went the way of the dodo; the monster didn’t bat an eyelid.
I was back and this time asking for naltrexone. I’d also printed out pages of the clinical papers I found on the Internet, and I sat with him and discussed The Sinclair Method. He looked up the drug in his pharmaceutical reference book and finally, with trepidation, he gave me the piece of paper that represented my last hope of recovery, my hopeful stay of execution.
I had to go to a compound pharmacy (one that makes special drugs to order) to fill my prescription. Within fifteen minutes I had fifteen pills. I stopped by Trader Joe’s on the way home and bought a bottle of red wine and a steak. I was PMS-ing and David was out of town. It was the perfect time to schedule the first experiment.
I shook the plastic pill bottle at the traffic lights, like a witch doctor rattling bones for good luck. The wine sat next to me in the passenger seat. The way home involved driving right past the khaki-colored bus stop on Coldwater Canyon. I turned and looked at it as I drove past and was overcome with emotion. I had to pull over.
I couldn’t believe that the pills could work, that I didn’t need to abstain. It was too good to be true.
Nothing’s for free, babe.
The very idea seemed to go against everything I’d learned at AA and in rehab and at the detox center. The monster was rattling around in my head. I was shaking, tears streaming down my face. The bus stop, the ride to rehab with Holly and my mom, the back of the rapist’s van, the sight of my mom in a bloodstained shirt holding Patrick’s bandana in her hand, it was all the same place—the monster’s cave, its place of power—and I’d been trapped in it for so long that I didn’t know if I had the courage to leave.
Claudia, honey, this is just another dead end. Everything else you’ve tried has failed and you know you swore never to pop pills. Throw them out the window and go home. We’ll enjoy the wine together.
As soon as I got home I took the pill. It was 5:45 p.m. on February 22, 2009. I waited until 6:45 before having a glass of wine—I wanted to make sure the pill had time to work. I was nervous, but I’d gotten my courage back after the bus-stop incident. I was so hopeful!
After I drank the wine, I felt a little dizzy and found that I could only eat a little of the steak and spinach on my plate. I also felt a little stoned and not at all clear-headed.
Why are you doing this?
The monster was still posturing, but I noticed that her voice lacked power. She was anxious as well. I didn’t dignify her with an answer, and she knew why. She knew that, more than anything, I wanted to be normal.
Soon I was struck by a revelation: It’s 7:15. I’ve only had one glass of red wine and don’t feel like having another. By now I should be well on my way to polishing off the bottle.
It was a week before I touched another drop—this time, three glasses of wine. I slept like crap and woke up tired and thirsty the next morning, but the monster was still silent. The binge that I was sure would overtake me like a tsunami had arrived as only a minor swell and quickly receded.
A month after that, I took my pill before having my first social drink, a glass of wine with people in my writing class. I was hyperaware of how strange it felt to be normal. It was as if I were standing outside my body watching myself laugh and socialize. I kept waiting for something bad to happen. Nothing did. A month earlier I’d have been on my third glass and working out how to sneak the unfinished bottle into my bag when no one was looking.
Another week passed, and I attended my first post-Sinclair dinner party with David. I found that my body was adjusting to the pill. I didn’t feel so dizzy anymore.
It had been a month since I’d seen the monster in the mirror, and though she was still running around in my mind, threatening and cajoling, I could sense she was getting desperate.
Then came the real test: a trip to Napa to visit my mom and stepfather. It’s feeding time in the lion enclosure and Claudia’s on the menu. I took two bottles of red to last the whole trip.
And then the carnage began. My mom questioned my latest attempt to fix my life. My stepfather once again posited his carefully thought-out theory that I was injecting hard drugs. I stayed cool like Fonzie. I drank my wine, a glass a day, and returned to L.A. without going on a single binge, having tamed the lions.
It seemed that while I was on The Sinclair Method nothing could trigger me to drink. I still have cravings when I have PMS or if I have a long, difficult day, but there seems to be a disconnect between the voice of the monster and the dangerous behavior it previously triggered.
I took on another big challenge—a trip to Italy with David. Tuscany, land of the luscious red. I resigned myself to drinking only at night. No repeat of the turmoil in Tahiti. I wanted to remember my time in Italy.
I was still thinking like an alcoholic. I obsessively counted my supply of naltrexone, ensuring I had enough, but I was anxious without cause. I took my pill as instructed and only drank too much on one occasion—four glasses with a gorgeous meal of pasta puttanesca—but even that didn’t lead to a binge.
I returned from Italy triumphant, a Roman emperor having vanquished the barbarians.
By the time I’d used The Sinclair Method for six months the dizzy feeling was completely gone. I cut out drinking during the week altogether, only imbibing on weekends, and then only on special occasions—a few glasses at a dinner party or on a getaway with David. My desire to consume alcohol steadily declined, taking my abnormal behavior with it. I didn’t feel dizzy at all or experience any side effects. My life was back to how I remembered it before the monster came along. Drinking, I could honestly take it or leave it.
But fear is the hardest of human emotions to conquer. I was still reluctant to declare total victory; I didn’t want to be like George W. Bush and hang out the “Mission Accomplished” banner before I’d really won the war.
It wasn’t that long ago that, when I wasn’t thinking about what to drink or where to get it, I’d kill time calculating how many days I’d wasted recovering from binges (165) in the hope that the sheer number would deter me from wasting any more.
But my confidence slowly grew. The bottles of wine in my cabinet were only used at dinner parties. The cooking wine that I used to guzzle desperately could rest easy in my pantry beside the Marsala and Cognac—they’d only ever be used as intended, to make sauces for my recipes.
My brain was changing, and as it did I was reclaiming my life.
It took another year, watching the monster slowly wither and retreat from sight, until I made the call, the official announcement. I’d battled the monster for close to a decade, and now I’d finally won. Print the headline: “Armistice Announced—the Enemy Has Signed the Treaty—Peace at Last!”
It was the spring of 2010, I’d been on The Sinclair Method for a few months, and I was getting a manicure-pedicure at this Korean beautician’s place when my phone rang. It was Adam Rifkin, my director friend from the good old days.
“Claudia, I’m working on something right now for Showtime. It’s a TV version of my movie Look, do you want to be in it?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“It’s a really funny character. Her name’s Stella. I wrote her specifically for you. I’d love for you to be in it.”
I was so grateful, so happy! By “funny” he meant that she was a paranoid, alcoholic cokehead and, according to the production notes, a fortysomething MILF.
“Claudia, you still there?”
I was so stunned, I’d forgotten to talk.
“I’m still here.”
“It’s really low budget, so there’s not much money in it…”
“But I’m gonna be back on TV?”
“Yeah, you’ll be on Showtime.”
And there it was. My career was back. I felt the world change around me, the final piece fall into place. I knew it was real. It felt just like when I got my first role on Dallas all those years before. The drought had been broken.
Then another job came, voice work on a computer game, and after that another. I worked on a sci-fi short film written by an Aussie named Morgan Buchanan, who became my regular writing partner (and co-author of this book). We started writing a series of future-Rome sci-fi novels.
I had my life back. People wanted me to be in their lives. Hollywood wanted to make use of my talents. It was a rebirth in every way.
In May 2011 David and I were back in French Polynesia. Mo‘orea was beautiful as I stared at its green and gray volcanic mountains from my over-the-water bungalow. I was the happiest I’d been in over a decade, an alcoholic who had found a cure.
David stood by me through the tail end of my struggle, and although he was incredibly supportive our social life had taken on a dismal atmosphere of early dinners and subdued conversation. Now we enjoyed cooking together, dinner parties, wine, and laughter. We survived the monster together and emerged from that ordeal as stronger, closer friends.
My life had come full circle. I had worked hard, taken risks, and believed in myself at the start of my career in Hollywood. I’d experienced meteoric highs and cataclysmic lows. I’d gone from a smart, attractive woman in her early thirties with a six-figure income, a mansion, and a successful career to someone consumed by addiction, an unrecognizable creature, sneaking out, drinking spirits from a paper bag in a bus shelter. I’d gone from someone who was in love with life to a woman who was humiliated, wracked with suicidal thoughts. And now I’d been given the ultimate blessing, the ultimate miracle—a fresh start. Not the false start I used to have when I’d recover from a binge. This was real; I could feel it in my bones.
The Tahitian water is a bright, azure blue, creating an atmosphere of invigorating peace. I’m halfway through my glass of champagne. When I finish it, I’ll get a massage and later go snorkeling with David in the lagoon teeming with tropical fish. I’ve had my pill, and the monster slumbers in the back of my brain, as if it had never been. I actually see Tahiti this time, the color, the slow pace of life, the beauty. A white seaplane flies overhead carrying passengers back to the main island of Tahiti. I’ll be on that plane soon enough, heading back to star in a new film. My friends were right, this is paradise, but so is every aspect of my life now. I’m free from hell; I can finally enjoy heaven.
<a l:href="http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html">http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html</a>.
<a l:href="http://www.28weekrecovery.com/index_files/Page389.htm">www.28weekrecovery.com/index_files/Page389.htm</a>.