I am in my mother's guest room. I am lying in bed. I am utterly still. The light is blinding. I pull the pillow over my face. I am dimly aware that in the course of about two months, I have gone from a job teaching college, a lovely house near Golden Gate Park, and half a dozen maxed-out credit cards to lying in a bed in my mother's attic, from which I have not emerged in a hundred years. I am filthy, heavy. I weigh down the bed. There is no reason to move. They've taken all my credit cards and closed all my accounts. They've quit my job for me and dropped me out of school. My car and all my things are right where we left them, in California, now the burden of my furious friends. Periodically my mother appears with food, or tea, or other unnecessary things. I watch her mouth move.
Awake at night, I sit on the floor watching TV with my mouth hanging open. In hell, Jerry Springer reruns play all night. Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry! Days go by. Then weeks. Months. It seems that I will never leave the room. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll stay here forever. I can't bring myself to care.
My mother drives me to Dr. Lentz's office every few days. I hadn't seen him in two years. I have nothing better to do, and going there differentiates one day from the next. Still in my pajamas, I go down the stairs, clinging to the railing, and get in the car with my mother. I lean my forehead on the window and watch the bleak city go by. The world is ugly and surreal and a very long way away.
In his office, I sit curled up in his chair with my head on my knees. He tries lithium, Depakote, Tegretol, Topamax, and nothing is working. It makes me slow. It makes me shake. But it doesn't help. Are you suicidal? Are you taking your meds? I shake my head no. I nod my head yes. I whisper, Make it go away. He says he will. He says he's trying. He says something will work soon. I'm sorry, he says. Hang in there. I stand up and shuffle out of the office and get in the car and the bleak winter streets go by in reverse and I go home and climb back into bed and stare at the wall, lurching in and out of sleep.
"Sit up," my mother says, pulling on my shoulder until I am partially upright. She hands me a plate of soft scrambled eggs. She makes me foods I liked as a little kid, in an attempt to get me to eat. I mouth the eggs as if I am very old and have no teeth.
She rolls up the blinds. I shade my eyes with my hand, my plate balanced on my chest, my hand shaking so hard the fork taps erratically on the plate. She sits down in the rocker that she rocked me in when I was born. This depresses me. The attic room has windows on three sides. Outside, the leaves are turning red and gold and brown. It is autumn, which depresses me. Time is rolling by without me. I am trapped in my body, in this sunny little room, in this single bed, in these sweaty sheets.
"Were you sleeping?" she asks.
I give up on the eggs and set them on the bed stand. "I don't know."
"I was thinking," she says, "that maybe we could bundle up and go for a little walk. Just a few blocks, if you felt like it. Get a little air. Wouldn't that be nice?"
I stare at her, alarmed.
"All right," she says brightly, changing tacks. "What about you try to come out of your room?" My eyes widen.
"Just for a little while. I'll come with you. We won't go far, just downstairs. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to talk. Maybe you could look at a book while I work. Could you just give it a try?"
I put my head back against the wall and tears leak down the sides of my nose. I note the tears and do not care. "So complicated," I whisper. "Completely overwhelming."
"All right, honey. It's okay. We'll try again tomorrow. So right now, maybe you could sit up all the way. Maybe you could read."
I shake my head. "Hands are shaking. Can't hold the book. I think it's the meds."
She looks sadly at me. "The day isn't being good to you."
I shake my head. "I'm sorry I'm such a freak," I say.
"You're sick. You're not a freak."
"You must hate me. I should go away. I should get out of here so you guys can go back to your regular life." That is more than I have said in days. I am obsessed with the idea that they secretly hate me and are only tolerating me because they have to. "You don't have to take care of me, you know. You could tell me to leave." My head spins with this thought, and I imagine how many steps it would take to get even as far as a door.
"I know that," she says. "This is just a good place to rest."
"Resting," I say. I'm not sick. I'm resting. I like the sound of it.
"Resting," she agrees.
I recede into my head, look out the window at the trees. She sits with me quietly for a while, then gets up and leaves, running her hand over the top of my head on her way out.
Fall rolls into winter. The trees give up the last of their leaves, and I watch snow fall past my window, collecting in perfect drifts on the black branches. If you put a camera in my room, you could watch the seasons pass in time-lapse. You could see me too, lying in bed, lying on the floor, sitting on the edge of the bed, always staring into space.
One night, out of nowhere, the image of a glass comes to me, sharp and precise: a glass of scotch, two cubes of ice. The thought is clearer than anything that has passed through my mind in months. The image is so sharp I can see it, taste the booze, feel the burn going down. The doctors' warnings don't even enter my mind—the meds won't work, your liver's shot, you're going to die if you keep this up—to hell with it. Suddenly I am on my feet.
My mother and her husband are asleep. I tiptoe through the house and creep down the basement stairs, wincing as they creak. I feel my way to the light switch, flip it, and survey the scene. I will find the booze if it kills me. I know it's down here. I will sniff it out.
I pick my way through boxes, stacks of ancient magazines, towers of old, worn books with cloth covers and gilt-imprinted words. I step over a sewing machine covered with dust, and over a steamer trunk. I open a door and find a small room containing a bin of coal, a cord of wood, and piles of old clothes. I climb behind the washer and dryer, look under the sink, go rifling through the racks of clothes. An hour ago, I didn't even know I needed a drink. Now it is my entire purpose in life, and I can't find it, and I am about to scream.
Maybe I find the energy to focus on something because of the need for alcohol. But maybe, irony of ironies, the fact that I am out of bed means that I am actually getting a little better. That won't last if I get a drink. As soon as the alcohol is in my system, what little effect the meds may be having will be nullified. The alcohol will, in fact, lift the depression—and skyrocket me into mania. It's happened a million times before. And right now, lower than I've ever been, that's what I want. More than anything, I want out of this hell. When that craving for a drink sets in, you don't think about the consequences. You don't think about the fact that there are many levels of hell, and the alcohol will merely take you to another one. It's instinctual. It's not a rational decision. It's a need. It has to be met. The need is all you know.
By this point in my life, I'm both a raging alcoholic and a person with uncontrolled bipolar. The two have become discrete issues that will have to be treated in and of themselves. Treating the bipolar won't cure the alcoholism, and treating the alcoholism won't cure the bipolar. But until I stop drinking for good, any attempts at treating the bipolar will fail.
I've never consciously noticed that I use alcohol to control my moods and have since I was a kid—and so I don't realize that its properties as a mood stabilizer have long since disappeared. Like any alcoholic, I ignore the fact that the booze stopped working the way I want it to work a long time ago, and can only remember the fact that, once upon a time, it did. And maybe it will right now.
So I keep digging through my mother's basement in the middle of the night, desperate for a drink.
I spelunk my way back to the stairs and look around the room, hoping I'll see something I didn't see before. And I do. There under the stairs is an old record player, a busted-in speaker spilling split wires, and a pile of boxes. I make a dive for them and start yanking them open, their soggy, bent cardboard ripping in my hands. I shove aside boxes full of letters, moldy hats, wool scarves, old kitchen utensils, and there it is. I see the box. I crawl toward it, breathless, crushing boxes as I go. I open it up and find a collection of bottles. Relief floods through me and I nearly dance with joy. I get greedy and start opening boxes all around it, and there's more, the hard stuff, some of the bottles already open, half gone. There are ancient bottles with fancy necks, round bottles, tall slender ones, all of them covered in dust so thick my fingers are sticky with it, brandy, aquavit, bourbon, port, cordials, vodka, gin, whiskey, and, praise Jesus, scotch.
I am a little kid on Christmas Day. I am a bride kissing my groom while everyone cheers. I am a soldier who just got laid. I am triumphant. The occasion clearly calls for a drink.
The depression lifts overnight. It's hard to believe, but that's exactly what happens. One day I am nearly catatonic, and the next I go rocketing into a mixed episode. Still, it's better, to me, than depression—at least I am in motion, albeit feeling like a fraying nerve. Everything is moving at a shrieking pitch, and my thoughts turn black and bloody. This hell is garish, sharp, and it cuts at my brain. I dream about blood. Death is everywhere, I breathe it, I smell it in the room. I want it, but the thoughts are spinning so fast I can't grasp it, I go flying past, riding some demon merry-go-round where all the horses smile their evil, mocking smiles.
There are many things that might trigger one of my episodes. But alcohol will.
I turn into a monster, screaming at my mother, getting more and more agitated every evening, ramping up into rabid, nasty mania by night. I go crashing out the door, headed for God knows where. In the morning, she finds me lying in bed with my face to the wall. She opens the blinds. You have to have light, she says. No. Please close them. Please. Depression settles in for the day. By evening I am nuts again, and go out into the night, and come back again to lie in bed, hiding from the sun. I can't think straight. I turn into Jekyll and Hyde.
I sit in the basement every night after I come stumbling home from wherever I've been, huddle under the stairs with my boxes of booze, drinking as much as I can possibly contain before I lurch back up to bed and pass out. I try to be careful. I can't run out. But of course I run out. For the first time in months, I have a reason to get dressed. I find my way to the bar, the neon signs and glittering bottles I know.
I have no more credit cards, no more cash. But at the bar, there are always men. And where there are men, there is money. I am humiliated, disgusted with myself, but I have no other way to get booze. It's easy to find a man who will keep me supplied, take me home, give me a place to sleep it off so I can go home to my mother's house not reeking of alcohol. She suspects that I'm drinking. I lie—just going to a coffee shop to read, or just having tea with friends! At least I'm getting out! At least I'm getting well! She backs off. I come home after she's gone to bed, stumble up the stairs, creeping past her bedroom door.
I can't keep their names straight. And then I find the perfect sucker. He's nondescript, without personality, ideas, or goals. He is a thing that occupies a barstool. He thinks it's cute when I drink him and his friends and everyone else under the table. Unfathomably, improbably, stupidly, he falls for me. I have lost all sense of human decency. It's no excuse that I'm sick.
I don't ask myself why I'm doing this. My vision has narrowed. I have become an animal, focused on survival. I stare straight ahead and press forward, terrified, clutching the bottle in my hands, living one day to the next, never slowing down long enough to see what I'm doing to myself or anyone else.
Then the real party begins. I'm back to the lipstick and heels, the spinning faces, the lights. But this party is different from the old fancy scene. This party takes place in filthy dive bars, where the stink of stale grease and spilled beer fills the air, where the thick smoke spins slowly under the Budweiser light over the pool table, where someone like me couldn't possibly be, but where someone like me absolutely belongs. I try not to think about how far I've fallen. I am broke, desperate, foul-mouthed, shitfaced, stumbling, slurring, clinging to a man I don't even know so he will keep me in booze. Drunk, at night, I'm manic as hell. I'm gregarious, excited, full of laughter and grandiose plans. Anyone who knew me before would back away as I sprawl on the floor. I'm trashy. I'm trash.
The mixed episode rages on, and I rage on, crashing through my mother's house, curling up in bed, flying out the door at night, hurtling back to the bar, getting more and more manic as the night wears on, then waking up disoriented, confused, squinting at the awful sun. I dress myself in last night's clothes and walk home, wishing to God I'd get hit by a car.
One night, I go into yet another rage at my mother, stuff my things in paper bags, and storm out the door and into my bar guy's car. Now I am living with him in his father's basement. He's in his thirties and still sleeping in his childhood bed. His floor is covered wall to wall with trash, clothes, magazines, dirty dishes, endless quantities of crap. I lie in bed at night drinking whiskey from the bottle, chattering on like a macaw until I pass out. We're perfect for each other. Apparently I have agreed to marry him. I have trouble remembering his name. I will work on this.
We move from his father's house into the upstairs of an old house that should be condemned, and there begin what he calls my John and Yoko months. He thinks it's funny. I take up residence in the bed, next to the bedside table crowded with bottles of wine and whiskey and pills. I lie there watching Thin Man movies. I drift in and out of blackouts, or sleep, it's hard to tell which. When the clock strikes five, I haul my drunk, depressed ass out of bed and get ready for the evening. The evening is the bar. I am drunk twenty-four hours a day. My tolerance is so high it takes me eleven drinks to get a buzz on. I find the perfect high around sixteen. Of course, I always overshoot the mark. By the end of the night, who knows how much I've had. I'm stumbling through the parking lot, elated. He's holding me up as I slip on my heels like a pig on ice. It's winter. It's freezing. I lie in bed, sweating alcohol, my skin clammy and gray. He feeds me fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I eat them every couple of days, like an anaconda. I don't look away from the television. I wash the sandwiches down with whiskey. At night, at the bar, I come alive. By morning, I am dead again.
Ridiculously, one night, I find myself in detox with the bums.
The cops escort me there during a particularly elaborate meltdown on a busy street and drop me unceremoniously at the door. I pitch a fit. I am wearing a very nice dress. Do they know who I am? I rage like a drunk rages. They ignore me the way you ignore a drunk. In the morning, they let me out. A few days later, I'm back in.